Digging Deep

It takes more than biographies to make characters come to life

Peasant Lifting Potatoes, Vincent van Gogh, 1885 / Source: Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam

Writer’s block, that mythical phantom, plagues all writers at some point. Among the many reasons you might be facing a brick wall, one is not knowing a character well enough.

How does a writer get to know a character? Prescriptions abound in writing classes and craft books: biographies, lists (greatest fear, favorite musician, hobbies, and so on), writing the character a letter, tangential exercises like “if my character were a breakfast cereal, she’d be _________,” and more.

These tell you about a single individual, but what about a relationship, like a childhood friendship? Friendships are characters in a story too, with their own personalities and arcs, but harder to capture with lists and timelines.

The three novels I’ve written follow werewolf Caleb O’Connor from ages seventeen to twenty-seven. The story of Caleb and the friends he’s known since age twelve haunts the books like an unquiet ghost. His childhood friendships motivate critical decisions that put wind in the narrative sails. I wrote biographies for Caleb’s friends, but that wasn’t enough for me. To hear their voices in my head, I wanted to know more: the nicknames they called each other, the pranks they pulled, what they argued about, how they stood up for one another, how they failed one another.

Consider this exchange from The Wolf’s Den, the second book:

“Caleb chuckled. ‘Toby and I used to argue about it whenever I came to the house, remember?’

“‘That was a long time ago,’ Sophia observed, trying to keep her tone flat and wishing that Caleb would stop bringing up the past. What good would that do anyone?

“‘Maybe not the first time I was here,’ Caleb mused. ‘That was—’

“‘New Year’s Eve,’ she finished stiffly.”

There’s history behind the tension in Sophia’s words because Toby, who died suddenly six years before, was her boyfriend and Caleb’s best friend. Before I could write this, I needed to know how Caleb, a shy lonely werewolf boy, became friends with brash braggart Toby and why Sophia fell in love with Toby at age sixteen and what happened on that particular New Year’s Eve.

In this excerpt from the forthcoming third book, Blue Moon, Sophia relives a memory:

“Sophia sprinted up the stairs. Gasping, she laid her cheek against Amy’s closed door. From the other side, claws scrabbled against wood and then another howl erupted. She’d heard a werewolf howl for the first time when she was twelve and had spent a fearful night up a tree with Toby, spying on Caleb. The memory twisted her guts sideways.”

What happened on that night fifteen years earlier?

To find out, I wrote and wrote and wrote: not lists or biographies, but stories about these characters’ early lives. Putting the characters into a scene forced their individual wants and needs to come into conflict. Revelations emerged, often surprising me. This taught me more about them and their friendships than any biography could.

I love my characters—all the more for watching them grow up together. I’ve dug deep for the stories that didn’t make it into the pages of the books but nonetheless left fingerprints on the margins. I’ll be sharing some of these scenes here over the next few months.

For all of us lovers of fiction, readers and writers, what makes characters come to life? If you’re a writer of fiction, how do you get inside your characters’ heads? I’d love to hear from you in the comments!