I find your advice really refreshing because it’s usually prefaced with something like “This is the way I do it, but it mightn’t work for you because there’s no one way to do it.” It’s reassuring to know that whatever works for us is what we should be doing.

Thanks again!

Writing questions are so hard to answer concretely, aren’t they? I really admire you for trying! I’ve been loving your posts. And, in the spirit of awesomeness and telling you how much I think your blog rocks, I just wanted you to know that I listed you for an award at http://teenbookreview.wordpress.com/2009/01/11/premio-dardos/.

Thanks for being awesome!

Second, I wholeheartedly agree that zombies reveal character.

Third, excellent post Justine! You has all the answers! For me, when I’m writing a character I tend to sometimes question the first traits or goals that come to my mind just to challenge myself to write someone who’s not a stereotype. So maybe the football player will be a thug or maybe he’ll be into fashion but the key is for there to be a reason for whichever choice.

(Also, I have the lowering suspicion that you’re right about Asimov.)

Yes, we all know that Scott is a closet unicorn brusher.

And that’s why there was no zombie.

Stories where people you like get everything they want are snores. Make them fight for it. Deny them things. Then you’ll find out who they are, because no two people solve a thorny problem the same way. They may win in the end, but if they aren’t dinged up, it probably wasn’t much of a story.

Something else: people with powerful passions/desires are engaging. We root for them because they’re laying it all on the line, sacrificing security and approval and short-term happiness in service of some greater goal. For those of us whose days are endless streams of boring minutia, that sort of focus and intensity is intoxicating. It’s the core of why we get so heated-up over spectator sports. The goal becomes important to us because it’s so important to them.

But if you want your fashion designer to be gay or your football player to be a thug, that’s okay. You can use other tricks. One I like to use is to force characters who have absolutely nothing else in common to have a common goal. That way, they work together and are forced to — if not like one another — at least respect one another, which requires finding hidden depths to what you understand about them. One example of this is Han Solo and Princess Leia in Star Wars. She’s a princess, a politician, a leader. He’s a smuggler, untrustworthy, a scoundrel who flies by the seat of his pants. But they need to escape the death star together. So they discover that they each have grace under fire and courage.

Like Justine, I rarely interview my characters. They reveal themselves to me as I write. If they do come up with something halfway through the book (like their mom’s a surgeon, etc.) then I go back and make sure that aspect of their character is woven through from the very beginning.

One time, I was writing a character and about 90 pages into the story I discovered that she was terrified of the water and didn’t know how to swim. This was a big revelation to me. Sometimes you need to write a lot about a character before you really know who they are. that’s why many writers write several chapters of a book then go out and cut out the first few chapters — it’s not really part of the story, it’s just them getting to know their characters.

Another bit of advice I like is analyzing character you like and figuring out why you like them and when it happened. This is most helpful when it’s a character who, when you write down her attributes, you probably shouldn’t like. Pick someone like Scarlett o’Hara in GONE WITH THE WIND or Cher from Clueless (Emma from Emma, same thing). Say, okay, this person is vain, selfish, manipulative, shallow — what is it I like about her?