Developing your characters

Image taken from 'The Angel Collector' by Bali Rai

Until I wrote Fire City (which is published in September) I had never invented a single character from scratch, using only my imagination. Every single person, from the main protagonists through to the peripheral ones, is based loosely on people I either know or have met. I'm the same when it comes to settings too. Rather than invent them I use the world around me. And that's something I'm going to tell you all about.

I teach quite a few creative writing classes. Time and again I meet aspiring writers who panic when it comes to sketching their characters and coming up with their settings. Either that or they don't really see the characters/settings they've thought up. The result is either unconvincing writing or no writing at all. Both of which are unwelcome. But how do you overcome these obstacles, where they exist? The answer is to use the world around you.

Let's say you're a Year 10, and you want to write a story about other people your own age. Is it better to invent those characters or to use the people you see in school every day, and may know very well, instead? I think it's the latter. You see - if I ask you describe a chair, and you are in a room full of chairs, the task is easy. But even in a room without chairs, the job doesn't become any more difficult. We all know what a chair looks like and we can all describe one. For me it's the same with the characters in my books.

Time and again I take people I know and use their physical traits as the basis for my characters. Manny in (un)arranged marriage is based on a member of my family. Rani, from Rani & Sukh, is based on a friend, with hair taken from a stranger I saw at a bus stop near to where I live. Personalities are often changed, so that I don't offend anyone (or leave myself open to legal action!) but the physical attributes are always based on real people. This does two things for my writing. Firstly it allows me to easily picture the characters in my mind, as I write. I never forget what they look like because I know them, which helps to stop any continuity errors in the story. Secondly, it frees up precious time so that I can concentrate on personality and motivation - which are far more important and of which I'll blog again at a later date.

And it's not just people. I've never completely invented a setting either, nor the things found within that setting. Fire City, which is a dystopian horror fantasy, is set in my home city of Leicester. Granted, I've taken liberties with the truth and invented extra buildings etc… but the blueprint, the layout, is one that I know without having to look. With books like Killing Honour and The Angel Collector, the setting is completely true to reality. That way, as my story and characters move around, I don't have to worry about what lies around the next corner, or make it up. The next street, the next park, the next shop - they're all really there and I simply use them. Again this gives me more time to concentrate on the plot, which is far more important.

As for things found within my settings - the same applies. Need a tree for your next chapter? Well take a look out of the window, pick a tree and describe it. If you can't see any trees, go and borrow a book about them, or bring up some pictures on an Internet search. For City of Ghosts, which is mostly set in India just after World War One, I used photographs and street plans to recreate the city of Amritsar. Then I added another layer, using my imagination. A bit like painting by numbers, it made the whole process much simpler, much easier. When the time came to include a banyan tree, I simply found a picture of one and used that as the basis for the one in the story. Easy.

When I was younger and working out how stories were written, I read as many books as I could get my hands on. I realised that many of my favourite authors used the real world and then added their own layers to it. Tolkien did it. C S Lewis and Roald Dahl did it. Now, I get the opportunity to talk to many other writers of teen and young adult fiction. Many of them might explain things in a different way but the idea is the same. Using the world around you to inform and create your characters and setting is something that many of them do. Indeed, it helps to make writing stories a little easier too. And if it works for all of us, then it will work for you too. Try it.