Building Characters

See, I have already lied to you, but you knew that because you’re very astute.

I don’t build characters, I discover them.

I have been playing D&D and TTRPGs for my entire life. I’m not exaggerating; my parents met at a D&D game, I don’t remember not having dice in the house, and I mispronounced “Paladin”* until my mother had a meltdown over hearing my siblings and I say “puh-LAY-din” when I was twelve.

That game was my first exposure to storytelling. Before I had Animorphs and Sabriel and Alanna the Lioness, I had Gary Gygax, Ed Greenwood, and Peter Adkison.

And I loved making characters. I had binders of characters**, the vast majority of whom never got to see a table.

I got a truly disproportionate number of hours of entertainment out of rolling their stats and writing out their backstories, and imagining them in situations and how they would respond.

So what happened? How did the little girl who built meticulous characters with thousands of words of backstory turn into the taller-than-average NB who throws vague silhouette’s into situations to see how they turn out?

Maybe you’ve had this issue, if you play TTRPGs. Or maybe you’ve had this issue, if you’re a writer. But somehow, no matter how thorough I was, those characterizations never survived contact with the table. Not once did someone remain how I’d built them.

They went different ways, not always slowly morphing into the same person****, but they never turned out to be the person I intended for them to be when I wrote them.

Being a person who takes direction well*****, I took the prevailing advice from my community — which consisted of the only D&D game in my microscopic home town, populated by men in their 30s who also primarily played self-inserts — and I wrote Even More Backstory ™. It got to the point where I was basically writing novellas for each and every characters.

And you know what? It didn’t help.

None of the other advice helped, either. Interviews, wounds, fears, coping mechanisms, it didn’t matter what I made before I put them on the table, it all went out the window as soon as I pulled the character sheet out of its protective plastic sheath.

And then, the first time I went to college******, I took an improv class.

We did all the things, the “Yes, and,” discussion, “Things from a hat” and every other game you’ve seen played on Whose Line is It Anyway?.******* I had the privilege of watching some truly, profoundly talented folks act, and listen to them discuss and dissect scenes and reactions. Doc would stop scenes mid-flow to talk to the actors and to the class about what happened, let people think through or talk about why they made particular decisions, and discuss the effects of those decisions on the audience and the direction of the scene.

I loved it. It was like watching Behind the Scenes footage.

Now, I’m not great at live improv, and I never was. I do okay among casuals, but I’m under no illusions that I could be any level of professional.

But the D&D table has so much less pressure than a stage. Those people have already agreed to do weird stuff for fun, they’re not expecting, nay, demanding, entertainment from me.

And my characters got so much better.

I learned to build characters backwards, to make a decision in the moment, and to incorporate that into the future, rather than deliberately reaching into the character’s past for reasons and justification. To let inconsistencies ride, and examine them with curiosity, looking for differences that might explain why things are different in this situation than they were in the last one.

I don’t build characters. I discover them.

Like an archeologist, or a nature documentarian, I feel like I’m following my characters around, making observations about them and trying to build that into a cohesive picture. “Oh, the barbarian is illiterate, but knows that her friends are following her and she will be deviating from the planned path. How does she communicate this to them?”

In the moment, chalk with an arrow and a little doodle of the landmark she was going towards.

But then what does that tell us about her? She bothered to communicate it at all, so she’s team-oriented. She respects her party enough to try to share that information. She’s not patient enough to just wait for them. All of that informs future decisions, and the character remains cohesive, despite not knowing her favorite color or how she’d respond if offered life-changing wealth.

When I start a book, I have no idea who my characters are. I give them a name, and I chuck them into a situation, and I watch them and see what they do.

There are some rules to this that I’ve found give me the best results, but they’re vague and formless. Stuff like, Someone in the scene has to react differently from the majority. And, If a reaction will cause conflict, then someone has to do that thing. But even these are kind of vibes-based.

Now, does this mean that the characters I was writing at the beginning of the book are a bit bland? YES. Yes, it does. But since nothing is inconsistent, that’s simple to fix in the first pass edit, which I do right after typing END********. I know the prevailing advice is to let the draft rest, but you gotta do what works for you, and I need to homogenize the characterization while it’s all fresh in my brain. I also go through and add any description that I missed in the rough draft. Then I let it rest and convince myself that it’s crap so that when I open it again I can safely reassure myself that actually, it’s not that bad.

Recent Writing

“And what, exactly,” Aubrey whispered, “is the difference between saying ‘I’m fine’ and saying ‘I’ll be fine in a minute when I have a chance to come to terms with the fact that I’m not dead’? Seems pretty close to me.”

Wayne shook his head slowly, eyes closed in dramatic disapproval. “The honest one is also saying ‘I’m vulnerable right now.'”

Next time, let’s talk about smut.

Do good, friends.

*It’s PAL-uh-din, in case you were wondering. Or at least it is in standard American vernacular. I make no claims to understand British or Australian pronunciations; I know which side of the Alumin(i)um Line I live on.

**Mostly women***, but not all.

***This is a joke for those of us who survived the 2012 American Presidential Election. Don’t worry about it, it’s not a load-bearing joke.

****I’m not going to pretend that a significant chunk of my characters weren’t self-inserts with weird eyes and unnatural hair colors, but that was a phase that went from the ages of 13 to 22, and I got better.

*****This is also a lie. Good catch.

******I have made eight attempts at college, and have zero degrees. I’m starting to think that formal education just isn’t for me.

*******Punctuation nerds, tell me how I’m doing here, if I haven’t already scared you off with my concerning level of footnotes.

********Also a lie. I type END, crack open a frosty ginger beer, and then I make a copy of the rough draft doc and start the first pass edit.