Activity

Eh… I’m not really sure what my biggest character break-through was. I feel like I’m in a state of continual break-throughs, each other better than the next. One pretty large thing was when I finally realized that my characters are allowed to breath outside the normal structure of their personality. Just because a character is mostly one way, doesn’t mean they can’t act on contradictions at times. Even though my protagonist isn’t a curious person by ANY stretch of the word, she’s still allowed rare moments of curiosity. And just because that one guy is a querulous sort, doesn’t mean he can’t be the biggest softy around children. The villain is allowed to be a stickler for his moral compass.

I tend to be a very black and white person, and I end up shoving all my characters into a rigid check-list of what they can and can’t do, inhibiting the surprises of their nature by not letting those surprises… well, surprise me. So yeah, I would say that one of the largest break-throughs I’ve had was letting the characters have a say in how they were written—even if it didn’t immediately seem to line up with how the formula said they should act.