I will be blogging on how I formulate my characters in the next few blogs. This is the first blog in a series about characters. I hope you enjoy it.
When I write, I like to think of my characters in categories and one category is evil. In many ways, in my mind, I like to put each character on a scale to see how much evil they are and how much that they are not. Depending on where my character may be in life and in my writing, will urge me to write them in certain ways. This is just a thing that I do. As much as I love to take an idea and run with it, I also want to create depth in my writing, so I like to take certain steps before I write, like when I look at my characters.
So as I am deciding on how much or less evil a character is, I formulate a plan of how I would write my character. I decide how much my character is too much evil for them and how much is not enough. For example: when I was thinking about writing the series of short stories, I took my killer and decided that this character was pure evil. And therefore they are capable of pretty much anything. However, when I wrote escapees, my first novel, the main bad character I decided was evil but not as extreme. Which meant that there were certain limitations to the character’s evil and how he would do things. This way when I write my characters, I write knowing when to add more badness to them and when to stop because it does not fit the character I wish to portray.
This is just one of many steps I take when in writing and with my characters.
