my favourite trope of all time is having a character with a mysterious and no-doubt unclean past and then some situation arises and they phone someone and the mysterious-past character says something along the line of “I need your help with x thing” and the person phoned goes “I told you, I stopped doing x thing years ago” and mysterious-past character says something very vague like “You owe me, remember? Vegas, 1994?” And the phoned person immediately is like “I’ll be right over”
What I love about writers is how they know their characters at their fingertips??
What’s the character’s favorite word? They know
Do they start with the left or right foot when they lace their shoes? They know
What happened to them at 5:37 am on a sunday morning when they were 8? They know
Writers are amazing
No we fucking don’t, we’re making this shit up as we go. Sometimes rereading previous chapter in a nervous sweat looking for something to expand because we’ve run out of new ideas and our muses are all standing around shrugging. I know what my characters will do when they do it, but up until it happens, no clue. I’m as surprised as you. For instance, I had no idea August was going to slam Brent’s hand down on the hot stove element. Then I shrieked out loud at the screen, “HOW COULD YOU?!”
This. Characters can always surprise you. I have been known to hiss ‘you little shit!’ at the screen while typing.
I know probably 25% of facts about my characters ahead of time. The rest of it I pull out of my ass as I write. Writing is probably at least 75% bullshitting.
“No wait stop don’t do that. No, I don’t want you to do that. Please don’t do that. Please I don’t want to have to rewrite that much plot…. Damnit….”
I have said that to my computer screen more than once.
Ok like when I write its either “oh ho ho I can’t wait to get to this little idea in my head” or “FUCKINGFUCKEDYFUCK” there is no in between. Sometimes I know something like that, such as their favorite colors but most of the time I dont even know if they like chocolate
I regularly discover things about my characters the moment before I type the words. Sometimes I sit down and figure things out through random thoughts or outside inspiration, but the rest of the time? As I’m typing. I particularly loved when one asked, “Even though I said no?” and I had NO FREAKING CLUE WHAT IT WAS HE’D SAID NO TO.
My original tags on this were:
“#john: velociraptor tamer pose and quiet distracting speech, #eric: launches himself out of the car screaming, #i: slam my head against the desk”
Eliza, dragging multiple people out of a flaming dumpster: I’m gonna befriend them
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