Understanding Your Characters
A friend of mine from my writing group has hit "the wall." For you non-writers, that's the point about a third of the way in where you start to really doubt your writing and you think everything you've written is crap. You're tempted to go back and start all over again.
In my friend's case, he felt that he no longer understood his characters. He couldn't sum them up in a few words and explain who the character is or their role in the story. I've met several other writers who have encountered this same problem and stopped for similar reasons.
In the course of writing my novel, I went through the same thing. I did a number of exercises, all of which basically took your character and interviewed them. You ask the character what their goals and desires are, what they love the most, what they hate the most, what they find most annoying. Yes, those things help. But they didn't lead me to any greater understanding of the characters.
What helped me most of all was to keep writing. I knew around Chapter 8 that my characters lacked something, but I also knew I had to keep pressing on. To be honest, it wasn't until I hit the end of the novel that I really knew my characters.
You see, the interviews work great, but they still only go so far. The exercises say to imagine the interview outside of the world of the novel, where you and the character are the only people in the room. However, that will only tell you so much about a character.
What told me the most of my characters was actually seeing them in action.
Put the protagonist with the antagonist and see what happens; do they click with a like mind or automatically oppose one another? Are they automatically aggressive with one another or do they act passive-aggressive towards one another?
Or put them with a love interest; do they flirt? Is the main character aware of the flirtation or oblivious to it? Do they remain fixed on the goal or does their judgment become clouded?
Those are all things that a character may answer one way, but in reality, they react differently.
For me, I thought I knew my characters, both main and secondary, but as soon as I got to the end of the novel, my weaker characters had strength I never knew they had and my main characters had viewpoints that I never planned but evolved based on the situations I threw them into. The reaction of my protagonist to the antagonist was really different than what I had planned all along; it was surprising to me, and yet, it was more compelling than what I had planned.
You will not - no matter how much pre-planning you have done - know everything about your characters until you finish the novel. Therefore, the sooner you can finish the novel, the sooner you will know your characters. (And even then, after the book is done, you might still learn something new about them.)
In summary, if you find that you think you no longer understand your characters and that little voice is telling you to start over (or worse, quit altogether), what you need to do is not go back to the beginning, but to press on. After all, no one gets it right the first time; you WILL have to do revision. But by continuing on in the story and discovering more about the characters as the plot progresses, you can go back and fix all of that at the revision stage, and you can start the revision process knowing the characters better - and save time and aggravation.
Exercise - One exercise I found that helps with this is to describe your characters without using adjectives or adverbs. Can you describe your characters using only nouns and verbs? By doing this, you can understand your characters through their actions instead of their descriptions.
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