Writing a novel or a story of any kind always begins in that infinite white expanse, that void. It’s like you’re beamed down to this arctic wasteland with a bag of tools and it’s up to you to build a shelter, get a fire going, and hunt down some people to help you create a whole universe. Those people are your characters.
This can all go different ways. Fairly often, the shelter you build will be flimsy and leaky, the fire you start will gutter and smoke, and the people you drag out of the featureless wilderness will be the sort of assholes you can’t bear to spend one minute with. That’s when you pull out the satellite phone and call for the chopper, soak the campsite in gasoline, and set the whole place ablaze as you hang from a rope ladder being carted off to the next featureless campsite.
Even if you manage to get a toehold in one of these wildernesses, the problem of populating it can remain. Sometimes your characters just don’t work out. And sometimes you just have to hang around trapping characters until you meet one you like.
The Most Dangerous Game
Our characters are usually based at least in part on people we actually know, either consciously or unconsciously. And that means that sometimes the people we sketch out in an early draft are not people we want to spend any time with, which can poison the whole story. Even villains need to be entertaining and interesting on some level; after all, we don’t always like the people we spend time with, do we? But sometimes those people are goddamn entertaining.
The trick with characters, sometimes, is twofold. On the one hand you have to remember that characters can be portable—just because a story you’re working on isn’t working doesn’t mean that one or more of the characters you’ve created can’t be moved into a different story, a new setting. On the other hand, coming up with characters you want to spend time with is sometimes just a matter of hanging out in a story long enough to meet one you like. In other words, just keep inventing people until you Frankenstein one that catches your interest.
Once you have one or two worthwhile characters, you can surgically remove them from the mess you’ve been working on and start fresh—and now that you have characters you like, the story might come easier, because just imagining two characters interacting often results in a story more or less organically.
Of course, as in life, sometimes you’ll find yourself in that wasteland of ideas until 4AM, headachy and bleary-eyed, surrounded by assholes. When that happens … gasoline and a chopper.