CHARACTER WORK

Character Work
By Devon Ellington


The majority of questions about my work are questions from people wondering how I come up with my characters. That’s not an easy question to answer: Anything a writer experiences, sees, hears, touches, feels, etc., is somehow transformed into material. It’s inherent in the process.

Sometimes, characters are inspired by people I either know or I’ve observed on a train, in an airport, at a restaurant, or whatever. However, when I do my job properly as a writer, the character evolves away from the original inspiration into a unique individual.

In other words, say I’m annoyed at John Smith for whatever reason. He’s done something that gets on my last nerve, and I have just had it. John Smith might be someone with whom I work; he might be someone with whom I had a personal relationship and I now feel betrayed; he might be someone I observed on a subway platform, or who cut me off on the highway. For whatever reason, John Smith angered me.

Well, I need an antagonist in my piece and several secondary characters that answer to him that can be disposed of at will. I’m not going to call him John Smith. I think I’ll call him Rex Pratt. “Rex” means “king” and “Pratt” means “fool”. So I’ve named my character King Fool. I already feel better.

Will I give him the physical characteristics of John Smith? That depends on the needs of the story. John Smith might have dark hair and brown eyes and be 5’9”, but if I already have characters with those physical features, I’ll want some contrast. I’ll lighten his hair, give him hazel eyes. Depending upon what I need him to do in the context of the story, I might make him shorter or taller. If I want to make him a strong, interesting antagonist, rather than simply a secondary character that gets killed off or damaged early on, I’ll make him more physically fit and more intelligent than the original John Smith.

Where is Rex Pratt from? Where did he go to school? What’s his vocation? How does he like to dress? Does he have friends and family, or is he a loner? Is he social or anti-social, and how does that affect the way he pushes against my protagonists? Most of that I will discover as I write the first draft. If I decide too much ahead of the writing, I lose the character. But all of these things will affect how Rex responds to the situations in which he finds himself, and how he works against my protagonists.

Look: I’ve stopped calling him John and am now calling him Rex. He’s already evolved.

By the time the book is finished, I may vaguely recall that John was the inspiration, but Rex is entirely his own person.

The characters in HEX BREAKER evolved a bit differently than they usually do in my work. I had the idea for Jain Lazarus early on, but I wasn’t sure what to do with her, or where to put her. I had character, but not context.

The first scenes that came to me were the scene where Jain, Billy, and Nick are chased coming back from a late night film shoot, and the scene where Jain decapitates the zombie. Both scenes were born out of exhaustion and frustration as I returned home from long days on set. One night I had an idiot in an SUV trying to climb up my tailpipe, and I was not amused.

Character-wise, I knew the protagonist was a woman and I knew that two men with the characteristics of Nick and Billy were with her in both those scenes. I wasn’t yet sure it revolved around Jain.

The opening scene in the book is based on a dream I had while working on a Broadway show, with two friends who were the inspiration for the characters of Zig and Randy. Nick and Billy were in those scenes, along with the woman who I soon realized was Jain Lazarus.

I thought I knew where I was going from there. I sketched out the overall arc of the story and figured out the film within the story. I tweaked Nick and Billy a little bit as a spoof/homage to two specific actors who’ve appeared together in a couple of films; they quickly evolved away from those actors into their own men.

Billy was going to be Jain’s foil. I didn’t want to plan too much of their relationship; I wanted to discover it as I wrote. Nick would be their obstacle, although I was pretty sure he wouldn’t wind up being the Ultimate Antagonist.

And then Wyatt sauntered into Chapter Two, took over, and everything went to heck. There was no precedent for Wyatt; he wasn’t in the plan. And yet he came in as a natural consequence of events, the sparks flew between Wyatt and Jain, and the rest . . .is HEX BREAKER.

I considered demoting Wyatt to a minor character. I considered killing him off about half way through the book. I considered the possibility that he and Jain would become enemies, not allies, and especially not lovers. I considered turning Billy into the Ultimate Antagonist, or killing him off.

Jain and Wyatt weren’t having it. They were not about to let me deep six Billy, either. And they won. Ultimately, it served the story.

Trusting the character to lead my story along its best possible route was the best thing I could have done. And, it opened up possibilities for future stories far beyond the scope of HEX BREAKER. I originally planned it to be a one-off. Now, I can’t stop the stories about these characters from flowing. They ALL have a lot to say.

Do I remember the initial inspirations for some of the characters? Of course. Do my characters now resemble them? No. They are absolutely themselves.


Bio:
Devon Ellington’s novella HEX BREAKER was released by FireDrakes Weyr in August. Visit the Hex Breaker website at: http://hexbreaker.devonellingtonwork.com/ and her blog on the writing life, Ink in My Coffee: http://devonellington.wordpress.com/. She publishes in a half a dozen names in both fiction and non-fiction. Her plays are produced in New York. London, Edinburgh, and Australia.