Hello again, my friend.
Pull up a chair.
I've been thinking about people lately.
Funny enough, I originally sat down intending to write about characters. The longer I sat staring at the page, though, the more I realised I wasn't really thinking about fictional people at all.
I was thinking about us. About real people.
I think the way we approach characters says a lot about the way we see humanity, more than it does about our writing ability.
That might sound like a strange thing to say in an article that's supposed to be about writing, but I genuinely believe it.
Give ten writers the exact same character prompt and you'll end up with ten completely different people.
Not because one writer has a wilder imagination than another.
Not because one writer is technically better.
Because every one of us has lived a different life.
We've loved different people.
Lost different people.
Been disappointed by different people.
Forgiven different people.
Every one of those experiences quietly changes the way we look at humanity.
Whether we realise it or not, that understanding slips into every page we write.
Looking back, I think I've always been this way.
Even as a wee boy, I was fascinated by people.
I don't mean fascinated in the sense that I wanted to stand back and observe them like some kind of wildlife presenter hiding in a bush.
More in the sense that I wanted to understand them.
I remember being around seven years old and arguing with my sister. At one point I wanted to hit her. I didn't. Instead, I went to my mum in tears asking why I'd even had that thought.
“Does that make me a bad person?”
Looking back, I was probably far too hard on myself for a child, but it tells me something about who I already was.
I was always trying to understand why people thought what they thought.
Why they did what they did.
Even myself.
I don't think I realised it then, but that curiosity would end up shaping almost everything I've done since.
It shaped my love of acting.
It shaped my love of voice acting.
It shaped the way I observe conversations.
Eventually...
It shaped the way I write.
There was probably another reason too.
Children have funny ways of adapting to the world they're raised in.
Growing up, my father could be incredibly unpredictable. Sometimes I genuinely couldn't tell what would set him off.
My need to understand people became a tool for survival.
It helped me anticipate what might happen next.
Now, I don't say that looking for sympathy.
It's simply part of the road that led me to becoming who I am today.
Perhaps that's why I've never really felt like I was inventing characters.
I've always felt like I was trying to understand people who just happened to live in another world.
The thing is, Endrin never really felt fictional to me.
That's probably because, in many ways, he wasn't.
No, I don't have a wooden arm.
I certainly haven't become the God of the Forest... yet.
Endrin began with a question I asked myself after my diabetic coma.
“If my body had been lying like a potato in that hospital bed... where had my mind, my soul, gone?”
That question eventually became the Yggdrasil Forest.
Endrin became the man who woke up there instead of me.
I saw the world through his eyes from the very beginning. He never really felt like a character I was creating.
He simply felt real.
Now, before anyone gets the wrong idea, I'm not saying every character should be based on yourself.
Please don't.
The world already has enough versions of us walking around.
The version we show strangers.
The version our friends know.
The version our children know.
The version our loved ones see.
The version we believe ourselves to be.
None of them are fake.
None of them are lies.
They're simply different pieces of the same person.
That's true of us.
Why wouldn't it be true of our characters?
One of the biggest misconceptions I see is the idea that you need to know absolutely everything about a character before you begin writing.
Their birthday.
Their favourite food.
Their favourite colour.
The name of their childhood pet.
Now, if that's your process, brilliant. I'm certainly not going to tell you you're doing it wrong.
Personally, though, that's never been how my mind works.
I usually begin with one honest truth about the character.
Maybe they're deeply cynical because life has taught them not to trust anyone.
Maybe they're relentlessly optimistic because hope is the only thing they've ever had.
Maybe family comes before absolutely everything else.
That's enough to start.
That's the lens through which they see the world.
Everything else grows naturally from there.
Now, I have a cheek to talk.
Sometimes I haven't got a clue what my own characters are going to do.
Writers get stuck.
I certainly do.
When I was writing Fate of Elarion, I spent days trying to figure out how Deytonna would respond to Endrin's death.
Then I had to write Lochlin.
Logan.
Saga.
That was even harder.
As some of you may know, I based the members of the Skarn family on my own family.
By that point in the series, though, they'd grown older than my own children are today.
For the first time, I couldn't lean on my own experiences as a father.
I was trying to imagine the future.
Eventually, I realised I was asking the wrong question.
I kept asking:
“What should happen next?”
The better question was:
“Who have these people become?”
I went back through everything they'd experienced.
Every triumph.
Every mistake.
Every loss.
Every lesson.
How had those moments changed them?
How had they grown?
Once I understood that...
The answer usually revealed itself.
Not because I'd suddenly become a better writer.
Because I'd caught up with the people I'd been writing.
If you ever find yourself stuck with a character, here's something I'd encourage you to try.
Don't ask yourself what you would do.
Borrow their perspective.
Borrow their childhood.
Borrow their fears.
Borrow their hopes.
Borrow their values.
Borrow everything they've lived through.
Then ask yourself the same question.
If the answer still doesn't feel right...
Don't ignore that feeling.
Ask yourself why.
Quite often, that's where the next piece of the puzzle is waiting.
When my father passed away, I surprised myself with how much I grieved.
We'd had an incredibly volatile relationship for years.
I'd already accepted that we'd probably never become close.
It took me a long time to understand what I was actually grieving.
It wasn't the man.
It was the possibility.
The possibility that one day he'd change.
The possibility that we'd sit down and have the honest conversation we'd never managed to have.
The possibility that somehow we'd become father and son again.
Did I honestly believe it would happen?
No.
But while he was alive, that possibility still existed.
The day he died, the possibility of that conversation died with him.
Looking back, I think that experience changed the way I see people.
It certainly changed the way I write them.
None of us are ever just one thing.
We're changing all the time.
Growing.
Healing.
Breaking.
Learning.
Trying again.
That's true of the people sitting beside us.
It's true of the people living inside our books as well.
Looking back, I don't think writing has taught me how to create believable characters.
I think it's taught me how to better understand people.
Some of those people live inside books.
Some of them live in our homes.
Some of them live only in our memories.
Every one of them has a story.
Every one of them has a perspective.
Every one of them has become who they are because of something we'll probably never see in full.
Maybe that's why stories matter so much.
They give us a different perspective that we otherwise might never consider.
Perhaps writing characters that feel like real people begins with remembering that real people are wonderfully, beautifully complicated.
Until next time, my friend.
With love, as always,
L. T. Stewart