By Joseph Lallo

The process of writing fiction almost always requires the author to assemble a handful of the same key ingredients for each story. At the absolute, bare bones, stripped-to-the-studs level, the two things you need are characters and plot. We won’t be focusing on plot today, but as an overview, there are two broad ways to craft it: Plotting (that is to say, writing an outline) and Pantsing (which is just “writing by the seat of your pants”). 

Writing characters is much more difficult to distill into a methodological binary, but that doesn’t mean I’m not going to try. Different people will have different names for their tactics, but for our purposes the two broad methods will be dubbed “Character Sketching” and “Character Discovery.” We’ll go into them in more detail shortly. For now, just know that my personal method is a combo that we’ll be calling “Character Improv.”

 Let’s not get ahead of ourselves, though.

Sketching is for Plotters

It really is as simple as that. If you are the kind of person who wants a flawless, reliable roadmap for the whole story, you’re going to want two things: a complete outline, and a stack of character sketches. Just as the outline is at least a summary and at best a beat for beat blueprint for the story’s structure and events, the character sketches are note for note biographies for the “actors” who will be performing your piece. Think of them as the character sheet for a game of D&D. They can be as loose or as detailed as you want, but at the end of the day they exist to make sure you know, before you set foot along the path of the tale, who will be traveling with you.

Character sketches often include, but aren’t limited to: physical descriptions, character histories, quirks and traits, principles and goals, and interpersonal relationships. Putting together a character sketch can be loads of fun for many authors, as you get to play both police sketch artist and psychological profiler for the star of your story. And more importantly, once you’ve laid out a good solid sketch, you’ve got reference material that will keep your character consistent as you write their story. 

This comes at the expense of flexibility. Stories don’t always go according to plan, and you can’t always predict who will serve the narrative best. If your sketch is too rigid, you may end up with a character incompatible with the changing circumstances. This isn’t a deal breaker, you can always iterate, but in the worst case this will lead to a great deal of redundant work.

This is why a lot of people opt for the opposite side of the spectrum.

Character Discovery

Having a map of the narrative isn’t necessary, or even desirable, for a certain type of writer. Those who like to sit down to a blank page and let the story unfold according to its own whims might decide the best course of action is to let the story craft the characters as well. This would be “Character Discovery,” and there’s really not much to it with regards to technique. Your cast of characters is as clean a slate as your plotline. As the needs of the story arise, the characters who can meet those challenges or who might have been shaped by that world step out of the fog, ready to have their fine details sculpted on the fly. 

This is certainly a more exciting way to tell a story (for the author). Not even you know who is lurking behind each twist and turn. This means of character writing provides you with a naturalistic development of personality that’s difficult to beat. It can also be very efficient, because anything that doesn’t impact the story is never established, so no wasted effort is put into building out a history that isn’t explored.

 But the method is hardly without its obstacles.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the consistency that is a strength of character sketching is a weakness of character discovery. You need to be diligent in keeping track of each new character and detail, or you’ll be at risk of contradicting yourself when the time comes to refer back to concrete details like hair color, number of siblings, or even name. (Let’s not talk about how, for several days, the published ebook for my first sci-fi story had the main character’s birth name change halfway through…). Essentially, unless you have a great memory, you’re going to want to end up with the character sketch that your Plotting counterpart started with. You also have to be disciplined with when and where you introduce new characters and assign new traits to them. It is oh-so-simple to end up with a conga-line of deus ex machinas, with just the right person showing up at just the right time, or our hero revealing a fluent knowledge of an ancient language that they just so happen to have needed right then and there. Revisions and retroactive foreshadowing are your friend here.

But maybe there’s a way to split the difference…

Character Improvisation

Like many authors, I didn’t start my writing journey with a full knowledge of the various methods used to craft narrative. (I guess you can say I “pantsed” my writing career.) Different books were written using different techniques. I’ve planned, I’ve shot from the hip, and I’ve started one way and ended another. These days I find myself pretty firmly in the plotter category for my longer fiction. Despite this, I try to allow for the maximum of flexibility, especially with regard to my characters.

When I’m plotting my scenes, I rarely prescribe exactly what a given set of characters will do in that scene, and almost never do I predetermine what they will say. Outside of the exceedingly rare instances of having a really good idea for a single line or a short exchange, the outline of a scene only tells me the direction the characters need to be heading as it ends. How the characters choose to get there is decided by the characters.

This is where you may note, “But Jo, you are deciding what the characters say. Isn’t that just you deciding how they’ll get there?” Yes and no. I like to write the dialogue line by line, each time asking myself “what would this character say in response to that?” These aren’t actors working from a script, these are performers improvising in the moment. (Hence “Character Improvisation.”) It’s not pure pantsing, because the framework of the scene and it’s place in the plot progression are established, but provides maximum flexibility on an intra-scene level. I find it gives me the fluid, natural conversation of a fully discovered character, while still starting from a place of structure and having a touch of guidance. And best of all, it allows chemistry to develop naturally.

Examples

Let’s look at some examples from my own writing.

When I was planning out Bypass Gemini (the aforementioned story where our main character switched from “Travis Alexander” to “Trevor Alexander” without me noticing.) I planned for there to be a snarky AI in a single scene. The gag was supposed to be that our hero thought it was a simple voice menu, but it was in fact a complete AI with human level intelligence. The outline for the scene called for “a few snarky comebacks due to the misunderstanding.” But as I wrote the scene, I found that the AI was really scoring some fun zingers. I was having loads of fun giving her better one-liners. Building out the main character by having him fairly quickly adjust and begin treating her like a person really gave him some depth as well. It made him feel like a better person, and gave her the opportunity to adjust her own opinion of him as well as her own expectations of how she ought to be treated.

The plot didn’t change much at all, but the AI became a much bigger part of it as I explored and experimented with her, letting her say what felt right at the time and having other characters act accordingly. By the end of the story I’d resolved to make her a staple character in the series from that point forward.

Similarly, when I was writing Free-Wrench (and more generally when I write any story), I didn’t plan romance from the start. This was an adventure story first and foremost, so it wasn’t a foregone conclusion that there would even be romance. Characters interacted, joked, argued, and generally bounced off each other as the scene dictated. And steadily, chemistry started to develop. Characters started flirting. It was never the plan, but these characters paired up nicely., those had too much friction. And entirely naturally, by the time I’d written two or three books, there was romance and drama simply because it was just how the characters had treated each other.

 My story was able to surprise me.

As with the other methods, you have to be mindful of certain pitfalls. This basically provides you with all of the pros and all of the cons of each of the other methods. Letting the characters have long conversations can be fun in the moment but lead to rambling scenes if you’re not gently nudging them toward a point. A willful character can also wrench your story off the tracks entirely, something you’ll need to assess on a case by case basis if their new way is best or if you need to massage them into a compromise. You can also have a sequence of events plotted out in advance that, as the characters develop, will simply feel inappropriate to who they’ve become, and unwinding that can be a bit of a challenge. But at its best this method provides your audience with strong, vibrant characters who have agency and personality that’s hard to plan for while keeping the story’s structure and pace on target.

Chatting with your imaginary friends

One of my favorite ways to describe being an author is “having long arguments with your imaginary friends and transcribing the results.” Regardless of whether I start with a map of the plot or if I hack my way through the literary jungle with nothing more than a machete and a compass, I find that letting the characters develop on their own has always given me and my readers the best experience. Has it meant my planned boy-meets-girl character arcs have ended up in bitter, unplanned breakups three books later? Yes. But it has also elevated characters from bit parts to main cast, and made the act of writing as much fun as the act of reading. You meet some of the most fascinating people when you let your characters pick their own lines. Give it a try and maybe you’ll find a new star!

About Joseph

Joseph R. Lallo hails from Bayonne, NJ--the fabled birthplace of George R. R. Martin. He has written dozens of novels and novellas, including the international bestseller The Book of Deacon and the critically acclaimed Free-Wrench series. In addition to writing, he has helped run run the Six Figure Authors podcast with Lindsay Buroker and Andrea Pearson.

Header Photo by Sujal Patel on Unsplash