We take on the roles of our characters as we write them; a rescue diver in the morning, a race car driver in the evening!
How do you write challenging characters?
They might be challenging to write because theyâve lived through things you didnât experience, acquired skills youâre not familiar with. Their personality might be different from yours, even downright detestable!
Do you approach your characters through research? Which of your characters did you âgetâ right away, and which did you struggle with?
I once gave up writing from the perspective of an ornery old lady who had been raised in Nazi Germany and survived the war as a young woman. Her life experience seemed so far away from my reality that I felt I couldnât give her an authentic narrative voice.
Are there characters from whose perspective you couldnât or would never want to write?
Actually, as a writer of speculative action adventures thatâs quite a common problem for me I do research on specific items, which has become much more available thanks to the internet, and I take situations and emotions I am familiar with, puff them up and translate them into my story world.
It can get tricky if this character is very different from me psychologically. Iâve always wondered what makes people act in complete disregard of other peopleâs well-being. I can approximate their situation, how they got there, and their train of thoughts, but it will always be superficial. Maybe the trick is to not overdo the introspection and focus on how they do what they do instead. How they take what we would think of as healthy reasoning and twist it into something we cannot relate to but fits their agenda. That is something we can observe from the outside, and thatâs what prompts our emotions as readers. If I can hint at an underlying reason thatâs a bonus to my mind.
Interesting! Can you give me an example? What makes an action adventure speculative?
That is an important aspect I didnât think about at all, thank you! Maybe itâs a good solution to describe the how and let the reader wonder about the why.
This is over two years ago but I wanted to answer here anyway.
To write challenging characters, youâd need to ask yourself so many questions about them. Some of them will become a proto-form after youâve asked yourself so many whys. âWhy? Oh? Really? Then why?â Donât take the first answer as the best answer. Keep asking until youâre able to find the answer that grabs you. Once youâve built the general outline of your character, you try to work inwards, and form a story around them. Once youâve formed a story around them, the complications begin: the relationships with other characters.
To make a character compelling, the characters need strong motivations, desires, traits, and conflicting ideas to make the story intriguing. Some characters can form within days. Others will take you years like mine did.
It took me 26 years to finally realize Hraldr Storvenaard, Hemery Eagan, Lorelei Corrigan, Sonja Dreschen, Dairan Vonschel, Praetor Gyrebei into their own molds. They werenât easy to build but the story got a lot more compelling and interesting once the characters were âmind-mappedâ in my head. Now, Iâve got a story I need to weave in and out. WIth Papyrus, hopefully, with six books, the series can finally tell the story of these characters.
Tolkienâs work took a long time. In that process, his characters changed, almost as if they were telling him about themselves. For example, he had a picture of Strider (Aragorn) in the Prancing Horse Inn, but didnât know who he was until later.
You can sit down and have a plan for a character, and suddenly it morphs into something else. Itâs happened to me. Malcolm Guite (and others) suggest that imagination is a lot more complex than we might assume.
in the morning, a race car driver in the evening! 
Which of your characters did you âgetâ right away, and which did you struggle with?
I do research on specific items, which has become much more available thanks to the internet, and I take situations and emotions I am familiar with, puff them up and translate them into my story world.