I wrote a little about this yesterday. Nancy Kress and a few other writers like to do really detailed dossiers on their characters. What their first car was, first this and that, what age they learned to drive, etc.
Steven James recommended against this, on the grounds that nobody likes to waste their time, and you’re going to try to work in crunchy peanut butter and learning to ride a bike into the story – because you spent a week writing the dossiers.
They are both correct.
As I wrote yesterday about a writer’s workflow, it’s important to know what works for you. I sit down to add a character into my novels, based upon need. Someone’s a little bit fussy about English, and he runs an antique store.
Ta-da. I have him in my mind. I write the story. He looks a little like a Hercule Poirot, except smaller and more fussy. He’s precise about the antiques in his shop. If you pick up a glass decanter in his shop and place it back down again in the wrong spot, he’ll rush to set it right.
Okay, drama rears its head. The antagonist enters the store, demanding information. He picks up a one of a kind Red Glass decanter and lifts it up. He begins to loosely swing it from side to side. “Tell me what I want to know, and I’ll leave you in peace. Now, where do I find Eric Blomly?”
It’s a torture scene, without any torture. The fussy little man won’t react that much to being slapped around. It violates his dignity, but life’s already slapped him around, and the antique shop and its precise scale and order is how he safeguards himself.
I wrote his entire character in 10 seconds. I wrote the exact outline of the scene and its conflict in the amount of time it took to write the above.
Now, he may have had to ride a girl’s bike for years, because he was too small to fit on a boy’s bike, and his parents didn’t have enough money to buy two bikes.
I don;t know. i don’t know when he first fell in love and with who. It really doesn’t matter. Fussy little antique dealer never existed before the moment he appeared in my book, and after the story is over, nobody will think about him.
If you can operate that way, excellent! I give you permission to create characters quickly and on the fly. And I give you permission not to feel guilty about it.
