Character exploration

Sometimes when you're writing, the hardest thing you come across doing is understanding your own characters. Trying to see what their motivations are, the dreams, goals, interests and dislikes. It may sound like obvious things, but they can be quite difficult to get when you're just writing down a plan for a character. Some things you may never think of when you're planning, but eventually it just comes up in the story, and you don't quite know what the proper response is for that character.

One interesting thing that I have seen people do is to write a scene between that character and another character you have that you know much better. Take two instances from completely different worlds and butt them head to head, and just see what happens. Having one character who comes from a post apocalyptic world where cannibalism is a common occurrence speak with a rich merchant from the middle ages who has always dreamed of retiring to a life of fishing makes for an interesting conversation, after all. Give them an explanation for why they are speaking, or ignore it entirely. In a way, it depends on the characters, and whether or not they care enough to ask.

It's the little things that really give a character life, and little things aren't things that you can just decide in advance. Things like how they respond to a sarcastic comment, or how long they laugh at a corny joke. What they're favorite color is and how much of it they wear. You might think you can plan these things in advance, and maybe for some people you can. But for me, even if I tried to decide their favorite color in advance, it would probably eventually turn out that I was wrong about it.

And you would be surprised how much a favorite color helps to define someone. It reflects on what they value and how they think and how they act. Colors have all kinds of meanings attributed to them, whether we realize it or not, and we probably know most of them somewhere in our subconscious. Things like blue being peaceful and red being angry. Yellow being light and excited, and black being dark and harsh. It might not sound like much, but over time it adds up.

But even after you've discovered all of these things about a character, they may not be consistent. They may go back on their word, change their minds, and evolve as a character. Something they did at the beginning of the story might be the complete opposite of what they'll do by the end. And you don't always have to fix that in post. Sometimes that hypocrisy is just another facet of who that character is.

No one's perfect, after all.