One of my favourite things about your books is your characters. And I was wondering - what advice would you give for aspiring authors about developing characters?
Oof. This is the hardest one for me to talk about, because for me, it was a matter of taking what I was doing wrong and learning to do it right, which… how do you do that? That’s the story of becoming better at everything. For me with characters, a big “click” that happened in my brain was when I realized every character is the hero of their own story. Every character sees the world through their eyes, that’s the only experience they had, and they don’t exist to fill a role, we don’t exist to fill roles, we fill roles! We fill lots of them. But that’s not why we exist, right? We aren’t sidekick, or we aren’t spouse. We fill those roles, and we identify in those roles, but we are not those roles, and when I started to treat my characters each like, I ask, what is this person’s passion in life? How do they see themselves? They’re okay not being at forefront of the story, but what in their minds they see as their life meaning? What do they want, who are they, all of these things, and I stopped sticking people into roles, which is really dangerous for an outline writer, sticking people in roles. I’m like, stop doing that! My characters really came alive a lot more. So that’s… I don’t know if that helps, but the biggest piece of advice I can give you is try to figure out a way where you can let your characters pretend like, well, what would it be like with this person the hero of the story, not just the sidekick, what would they do? How would they approach it? What would they be doing if they weren’t saving the world? If this plot hadn’t hit them like a freight train, what would they be doing in life, they would care about things! Would would they care about, what would they be doing.
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