I thought for this blog I would talk you through how I created one of my main characters, Hamish. Since it’s a love story there are two main characters, and the story will be written in both of their points of view, but Hamish’s will dominate and his character has really changed a lot since the beginning of the project.
When I first created Hamish he was not at all what I wanted him to be. He was incredibly shy, had one best friend who he spoke to about everything, wouldn’t talk to anyone or even look them in the eye and fell madly in love with the love interest on the first meeting. This type of character works in some romance novels, I’m not saying that it was bad, just not what I had in mind when I first started working on my project I can tell you.
I used a huge character profile which took me weeks to complete. It was really good in the beginning because it got me thinking about my character which was what I wanted. By the end though, I was making up a lot of stuff because I simply wanted to finish it so that I could start writing my novel, I kept trying to tell myself that if I didn’t finish the profile sheet then Hamish’s character wouldn’t be complete and I would make mistakes while I wrote. It was sort of like when you buy food at a restaurant, you get half way thru it and realise that it’s way too big for you to stomach but you push on because you fell horrible for leaving food on a plate when someone took all that time to make it for you (plus you pay for it whether you eat it all or just half).
I used the profile though, telling myself that it was clearly what the story needed. My friend also knew the profile pretty much by heart so she could help me out when we wrote together. By seven thousand words though I hated Hamish and everything his character was and had become since I had started writing and I gave up on writing for a couple of weeks.
As a plotter by nature I had honestly thought that working with a large character sheet would be the best way for me to achieve what I wanted, so I was surprised to find out that it didn’t work at all for me.
After I had given up I got something new to add to my story, the crisis that had been missing since I started writing. I didn’t want to give up on my love interest character because I had never started a character profile with him, but I could never see him with anyone but Hamish, in my head it just never would have happened. So I sat down and just wrote out a chapter how I wanted it to be, creating Hamish as a whole new character while I went. Once I was finished writing the chapter I wrote out some important things I would need to remember further into the book, like how he had reacted in a crisis, and how he reacted to people, how he spoke etc.
Hamish now has the personality I wanted him to have in the beginning. I have a notebook that’s split in half and whenever Hamish does something that I think needs to be noted down to remember, I’ll put it in there so I can refer back to it, his love interest is in the other half of the notebook.
So that’s how Hamish came about, I’m a lot better at creating characters now since I realised that not everything in my work has to be plotted completely before I sit down to write.