Saturday, October 09, 2010

Writing Meme: Day 9

9. How do you get ideas for your charac­ters? Describe the process of cre­at­ing them.

Ideas crop up all over. There’s not much control as to when they decide to pop in and make themselves known. It can happen when I’m watching a movie. Listening to music. At work when there’s no one checking out at the cash register and I’m just zoning out. Inspiration is everywhere.

After someone makes an appearance though and I’ve decided they’re worth taking a look at, usually a good daydreaming session will flesh them out. This often means staring out into space at some point during the day. A piece notebook (as I call it) can also be handy where I’ll put the character into a random situation and play with them to see how they’ll react. I get most of my development done while daydreaming just after waking up in the morning or before falling asleep the night before. There are times when music may be involved. Since most characters usually appear with a scene in tow, I’ll play out that scene. Sometimes the scene is worth keeping, sometimes it’ll get dumped.

Daydreaming. That’s my process. So very scientific.

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