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Story time.

A few months ago, this character popped into my head. Her name, for the first few weeks, was simply “princess”, because that’s what she was. Quiet and shy around her mother and father, fiercely brave around her comrades. Soon, my princess became a soldier, too, and she got a name–Evyn. Evyn Quin.

I’d already written three chapters of my WIP when a terrible realization hit me: this was not who Evyn was supposed to be. She wasn’t supposed to be content sitting in a castle, waiting for tea parties and dress fittings to happen in between raids and killing monsters. She was supposed to be different, more dynamic, and what’s worse, as that discontent came to light, it unveiled a restlessness that encompassed the entirety of my WIP. None of it felt right.

So I dropped everything, sat on my WIP for a few more weeks, and changed all of it. Mostly.

Fast forward to now, a few months later. I have no chapters written, and a few scribblings in my notebook, not a real outline, not yet. Evyn is…well, she’s a mess. She’s brave, reckless, stubborn, and loyal. She’s a leader of a group of freelancing monster hunters who help to protect her city and she’s proud of that, but she also carries around a lot of bitterness from her past, so she walks around with a lot of anger inside her. In some ways, she’s more dynamic now than she was a few months ago, but somehow she’s this huge, shapeless mess in my head, and I can’t pin her down. Or the rest of the story, for that matter–but let’s just focus on her now, ‘kay?

So, Story Embers people, *grins* teach me your ways. How do you pin down characters who don’t want to be pinned? How do you go about creating a character arc for someone like this? Help, please, I’m dyin over here. Help me get this idea out of my head!