Part of my biggest problem with taking on any project is that I tend to come up with projects based on situations or a story, or in the case of SF/F, entire worlds that I come up with. These things are more than enough to get my brain working on overdrive initially, especially with worldbuilding as I’m able to just put in tons of time into coming up with places and technology or societies and what have you. Coming up with worlds, and even an entire premise for a story isn’t a problem, nor is it a problem to get excited about the story.
My problem always comes when it’s time to write the damn thing. Because, honestly, any good narrative really isn’t about story or worlds or plot twists, it’s about characters. When you look back fondly on Buffy, I’d bet that most of the time you’re thinking about the characters, and how you connect with them and how they make you feel. When you feel connected to a character, they take you along the story and that’s how you get invested into it. Plot twists really don’t matter if you don’t give a shit about the people the story is affecting.
And that’s really the problem with coming up with stories based on plots or worlds. No matter how much thought you put into it, it’s just really difficult to feel particularly connected to it without quality characters.
And my biggest problem seems to be coming up with these quality characters. It ain’t easy. I mean, any idiot can come up with a character or ten, and toss them out into the world and start writing, but quality is the key there and I really think it takes a certain something to create interesting, quality characters. When I feel connected to my own characters, I find that it’s extremely easy to write entire books. Back when I was sixteen I’d created a group of characters that I really thought were very interesting, in a world that I really loved, with a story that just sang to me, and I was able to write two and a half full-length novels in under a year based on it all.
Mind you, eight years later I look at these characters and they aren’t very interesting to me at all, and I find them to be pretty two-dimensional and boring, but that’s called growing up.
I’ve got two characters I use in my comic Can’t Live With ‘Em…., who are loosely based on basically every relationship couple I’ve ever witnessed or been a part of, and I find the stories to be very easy to write because there’s just so much to pull from, but I wouldn’t really call them interesting characters yet, because they don’t really have identities (they don’t even have names) beyond the fact that you can probably relate to them in some form or another. This winds up being okay though, because, due to the episodic and relatively short nature of the comic, you can actually start out with just a base and work off of it from there. In just three episodes the two characters are shown to have very distinct personalities, and there’s obviously a lot that can be done with them, and it doesn’t really matter that they’re not fully developed, three-dimensional characters.
Episodic stories, like in comics, short stories, and TV shows really let you work things out as you go. Hell, that’s even part of the fun, to grow with the characters. But in mediums like novels and movies, where the beginning and end is completely encapsulated in one volume, you really have to have your shit together, and your characters need to be figured out. Even though your characters grow in movies and novels, they still need to be more-or-less complete right from the start, you can’t just have a base and grow from there.
I think I’m going to take a lesson from the Michael Mann playbook here, and do a whole lot of backstory writing with these base characters, and grow them from there, until they’re basically developed enough that they’re ready to be put into a novel. I think that, at that point, I’ll know enough about them, and be excited enough about them, that the novel will just write itself.
So to start, I’ll be starting off with a backstory about one of my Wasteland characters, Kevlar. Once I’ve finished the story I’ll consider posting it, but being that it’s just backstory to flesh out these characters for personal use, it might just not be suitable enough to post. We’ll see.