Over Correction – Creating Characters

I just get really stressed out about coming up with characters.

Is that bad for an author to say?

I’m not kidding though. All of a sudden this super-sweet-oh-my-gosh-how-cool-is-this idea will pop into my head and I’ll get super pumped but then… I will freak out entirely because I’m like.

OH NO.

I have to come up with characters.

Here’s the thing, and you can probably sympathies with ‘the thing.’ We all have ‘types’.

Like the base ingredients to the characters that we create. A handful of personality traits that we are like ‘wow that’s cool and I can work with that.’ I totally have a type. The problem is when you come up with a new idea… I completely stress out because I know I have a type… so I think of the main characters I have created previously and instead of thinking like a rational person and creating some very genuine characters… I freak out and just make the total opposite to what I’ve made before.

Like in How I Met Your Mother – the Over-Correction.

When you’ve done one thing, so to avoid that thing again to take a HUGE dive sideways rather than just being sensible about it.

Kind of like JK Rowling and the whole Harry Potter VS. Casual Vacancy thing… (no offense if Casual Vacancy is your jam…)

Anyway, so I was kind of in that place recently. I was like ‘oh yeah, I have a great idea for a story… now how do I make a cast of unique characters… I KNOW! I’ll just make them totally opposite to everything I’ve ever done!’

Then – thankfully – I stopped and chilled-the-heck-out.

Characters are hugely important. Far too important to use to make a point about how ‘different’ you are as a writer.

It is for this reason that you must genuinely seek out the personalities which will be at play in whatever super-sweet storyline you’ve just imagined.

For me, it’s taking a long, hard look at the story and asking the question: ‘what would work/seem natural here?’ and allowing the character to grow rather than picking a one-size-fits-all opposite of what you’ve done previously.

My dream is that the characters I create will be allowed to mature and grow and form in a way that is unique, natural and consistent so they lead the story rather than me.

I was watching the Gilmore Girls recently. Whatever your opinion about the Gilmore Girls no one can deny that there is a cast of well crafted characters within the series. To me, that’s the dream. To invent a cast that’s real, genuine, a little quirky, perfect for the setting and that people will care about.