It depends, really. Sometimes the character writes itself and the story is written after and sometimes I have the story and the idea of a character and then need to work on fleshing them out.

The Character Writes Themselves

For me, when a character writers themselves, they’re more or less established before I start writing. I almost already know everything about them and what I don’t know comes naturally when I start writing. I often don’t write character sheets for these types of characters because they live and breath in the back of my head. It’s often like a blooming painting in my mind that I try to catch and put into words. Their personality and appearance are already there and they have an established way they interact with the world and so I don’t feel the need to do a character sheet because I don’t forget anything about them.

I rarely change the design of one of these characters and don’t think I’ve ever changed the physical design, always sticking with the way they’ve appeared in my head. Sometimes I might tweak ages, or just start the story at a different time period in their life or clean up anything that might be too cliche but these are usually my most solid characters.

I Write the Character

Most of the time I don’t have this instantaneous birth of a character that starts writing their own story. I usually start with a story that I want to write and then start designing the characters based on how I want them to interact with that story. When I write from me dreams, I always try to rewrite the ‘main character’ from specific elements of the dream, because that ‘main character’ is me. Sometimes I’m not the central character or I have an established ‘other life’ in my dream, but I don’t want to write myself into a story as a central character and so I redesign the main character around anything that stuck out about myself in the dream. “What were the important aspects of my fake-life?” is more or less what I ask myself.

When designing characters from the ground up, I’ve found that the faster and smoother it goes, the more correct it is. If something doesn’t work, then I re-design the character again. I often start with the basics: appearance, background and motives. I have a form that I fill out for characters of large works that goes through all of the nitty gritty details of their lives like their birthdays, family, occupation etc. Though it’s good to refer back to and have all of the information about a character collected there, I’ve found that sometimes I have more fun filling out these character sheets than I do actually writing the character.

I do a lot less of this now and just fill out the brief character sketch in Scrivener or write down the more important details in a notebook. Sometimes having a lot of information about a character can just feel overwhelming, especially when I’m trying to do it for so many characters. I can get into my head thinking that all the information is important and needs to be engaged with (similar to how I work when running DND campaigns). Sometimes it’s better to have it simple and just note down info that you might forget. Although… to be honest, I have been reading one of my drafts and the eye-colour of a character changed mid-manuscript. Eye colour is probably something I shouldn’t be forgetting. I couldn’t forget it now though, because the character’s current eye colour is important to some of the plot (it’s an identifier and it’s also an unusual colour).

Has it Changed?

I give much more consideration to the design of my characters now. In the past I would write them in ways that I thought were cool but they were really just stereotypes. There’s also a great shift in appearance description as I think about representation. Writing as a young adult, I didn’t really pay attention to anything other than “that person has black hair and deep brown eyes and is brooding”, but now I consider the implications of using stereotypes and binaries. For e.g. ‘black = evil, white = good’ has no place in my writing. That kind of symbolism is something that I don’t do. In stories, I might assign symbolism to colours of the people but I always work to make sure it have a negative reflection of the real world. ‘Black = evil, white = good’ is not only overused and boring but it also has negative social implications.

I try to be more careful of what I’m designing in a character. Though I want to write characters more diversely, I don’t want to step too far away from what I know. Some characters represent stories/people that should be written by those people and not me.

You can also tell when I get carried away with character design because there will be a family tree with fifty different relatives and each of them will have a brief character sheet filled out. Those projects don’t often get any actual writing done. I also tailor character sheets for different stories as there might be information relevant to those worlds but not to others.

These days, I have a lot more characters that write themselves, and I think it might be a skill or writer’s awareness that let’s me do that. I definitively prefer characters to write themselves but still love to design them from the ground up. It might just be a name or a phrase but I’ll build them until they fit into the story nicely and the progression tells me it’s working.