Happy New Characters-I Mean Year!

"We wish you a merry Christmas and a happy new year!"

I think I'm going to make it a thing that I'll start off my posts with song lyrics of some kind. Because there are some really cool songs out there with lyrics that just inspire me. Some will come from songs I listen to all the time and find relevant to the post. Some will be from songs I've just heard of. Some will be completely random and have nothing to do with the post, but they sound cool and I go with it. 

Speaking of going with it, I figured I'd make my first post about how to go with your characters. 

As the writer of your novel (or short story or poem or whatever you are writing) you have the power to create the characters and give them personality. You can make them look the way you want them to look, talk the way you want them to talk, and have the same little habits that you saw that person at the mall do. But, and I know this from experience, your characters will change while you write. Even if you try not to. You can say at the beginning that your antagonist (the villain of the story 99% of the time) is going to be heartless and cruel and that he will love no one and he'll kick puppies when he's not destroying villages. But over the course of the story (which is easier to say than novel/short story/poem), maybe he'll become more 'human'. Maybe he'll fall in love or you'll add that he has a daughter or granddaughter (Catching Fire movie, anyone?) or he'll decide that puppies are too cute to keep kicking. And then he'll still be your antagonist, but he won't be the same antagonist you started with. So you might have to change the outcome of the story. Or you might not, depending on how much he changes. So here are some tips for what to do when your characters start to change without your permission:

1. THEY ARE STILL YOUR CHARACTER. Sticking with the antagonist, even though they are definitely not the only type of character that can change, if your bad guy suddenly decides that he wants to get married, let him get married. It doesn't matter if everything about them changes, from how they look to their name, they are still that character you came up with and they always will be. 

2. IF YOUR CHARACTER WANTS TO CHANGE, LET THEM. Say that your villain (let's call him Bob) wants to dye his hair from blonde to black so he looks creepier. Let him. See where the black hair takes you in the story. Maybe him having black hair will make your protagonist (the hero) think that maybe Bob is their father or brother or creepy uncle. Maybe this could lead to some little plot twist you wanted to add but never really thought about. 

3. IF THEY TRY TO CHANGE AND YOU HONESTLY DON'T WANT THEM TO, YOU CAN CHANGE THEM BACK. Yes, it would be very hard to dye Bob's hair back to blonde after the black dye has sunk in, but it's still possible. Just get it bleached. I'll use the example of one of my main characters in Fabricate, Derrick. Without spoiling anything, he used to be this old-fashioned, country-lookin' guy with dark brown eyes who was an all around good guy. Then, he wanted to be the bad guy and turn against Risa halfway through the trilogy. Maybe he'd join the antagonist. But then I decided that I liked him better as the good guy, so I made him mostly good with a dark side he doesn't want anyone to know about. 

4. THE ENDING OF THE STORY CAN STAY THE SAME. Just because something about Bob changed doesn't mean that the ending of the story has to change. Bob can still get shoved off a cliff into a tent of man-eating zombies. 

5. OR IT COULD CHANGE DRAMATICALLY. Or Bob could end up winning, taking over the world, and killing your protagonist. Just because the character changes doesn't mean the whole story has to change. But maybe you want it to change. 

You control the story. The characters could change up until the day you send the complete edited manuscript to the publishing company that will publish your story. But you can still control the outcome of your story. 

Thanks for reading this! I hope you all had a very merry Christmas and that next year will be filled with awesomeness and plenty of writing around! Drink some champagne for me (if you're allowed to)!

Jessie