Character is key

April 17, 2023

Developing characters is always a mixture of fun and curiosity, and definitely a mystery. This morning, at one of my favourite coffee houses, we discovered someone had carefully ‘discarded’ a copy of ‘The Light’, a rather sad little newspaper publication first generated in England in 2020. It is a beautiful example of the conspiracist mindset inspired by the flames of COVID and fanned into distribution by extremist thinking. The thinking is simple enough – governments are in league with big corporations and billionaires, especially big pharmacy, to control our lives. Well, given the common motivations of so many humans are selfish greed and power, that in itself is not an unfounded fear or even a conspiracy. Which highlights what some of the sheep supporting ‘The Light’ and conspiracy movements seem to want us to ignore - that they, too, are being led by people who are motivated by exactly the same desires. History teaches us over and over that people/groups come to power on promises of ‘a better life’ for the common person or a commitment to ‘the greater good’ of humanity, and end up being as greedy and power-hungry as the very people they deposed/murdered. Orwell’s tragically accurate scene at the end of Animal Farm is a mirror to history (if you’ve never read it, you should – it is one of the most powerful mirrors to politics ever written).

 Why the rant above? Well, one character in my latest project is being constructed from resources like ‘The Light’ (and another is ‘tainted’ by conspiracist thinking). To create believable characters, writers delve into places, lives and experiences that their readers might not. For one project, for example – currently awaiting my return – I won’t be surprised if the AFP knock on my door because I am delving into sites and information I would morally stay away from under normal circumstances, but to create characters – to understand their motivations, their intentions, their fears and hopes to make them real – I am wandering carefully through a maze unfamiliar to my friends and family.

What I’ve learned, over years of writing, is that much of what I research and note to create characters never makes it to the final print, but it is absolutely essential to have to make the characters ‘live’. For example, Chasse in The Last Wizard: Chasse’s Song suffers a form of PTSD after his traumatic journey aboard the dragonship. While he gradually comes to terms with what it will mean to be a protector of his family and people, I drew on a broad range of sources concerning trauma impact and PTSD – non-fiction and fiction – to determine what Chasse might feel and how I could potentially deal with his experiences to enable him to grow believably. Watching the film Operation Mincemeat last night reinforced for me how important it 

is for writers to either be directly involved with what they write about or to thoroughly research it. Like many people who came to Ben MacIntyre’s 2010 book or this recent film adaptation, I was pleasantly surprised to learn that Ian Fleming, James Bond’s creator, was a character in the story, and was directly involved with espionage in his career and obviously drew upon his experiences to write.
 
As I finish off, I’m making quick notes about two people who’ve just been ordering coffees. Be careful if you are anywhere around a writer – you may be written into a story.