My wildest fantasies
Sometimes I joke that my characters make themselves up.
Well, of course, that's not really true... but when I'm sitting on the couch, watching a series or movie, and suddenly inspiration bubbles up, it does feel a bit like that. As if a door opens somewhere in my head and a new character steps out and announces: "Hey, I'm part of this story now."
The characters in The Whispers of Ember have now entered into a kind of permanent lease on my mind. They live there now. And when I'm writing, I can almost hear them commenting on the choices I make. Sometimes it genuinely feels like they're watching me: "I would never say that," or "Nice try, but this doesn't resonate with who I am." And that's precisely where the magic of character development begins for me.
But how do these characters actually come about? For me, it always starts very simply: figuring out the kind of character the story needs.
With Aria, for example, I knew pretty early on that I wanted a caring yet tough woman. Someone willing to fight for what—and who—she finds important. Not a perfect heroine, but someone with courage, doubts, pain, and a big heart. From the moment I knew that, I started writing dialogues. Little snippets of conversation, loose sentences, reactions to situations that hadn't even been fully thought out yet. And somewhere along the way, it happened: Aria developed a voice of her own.
That's always a crucial turning point for me. The moment I write a sentence and think, "Yes, this sounds exactly like her," I know that a character is no longer just an idea, but a person in my head.
What I find incredibly important is that my characters have a backstory. Whether that background is ultimately fully articulated in the book is less relevant to me. Sometimes the reader only sees a small part of what I have in mind. But because I do know where they come from, what they've been through, and what their fears and desires lie, they feel much more real to me while I'm writing.
Hair and eye color are often the least important aspects for me—and they can change right up to the last minute. I find that sometimes the story shapes the character, rather than the other way around. Sometimes, while writing, I discover someone needs a certain look to better fit their role. In those cases, I'm happy to adjust the details.
What I find harder to change is their inner compass, their pain points, and their way of reacting. That's the core. I build everything around it.
Atlas was one of the few characters I knew a lot about beforehand. His history, his role in the story, his attitude toward the world… much of it was surprisingly solid before I even started writing. Yet, he also keeps evolving throughout the process. No character stays exactly as I envisioned him in the first draft.
I draw a large part of my inspiration from real life. Many of my characters are blends of the people around me: a bit of someone's humor, a trait of someone else's stubbornness, a look, a way of reacting. Not direct copies, but rather collage people. This allows me to throw myself into the story even more. I recognize emotions, patterns, and dynamics, and that makes it easier to remain honest about how my characters react.
In short: my characters don't really create themselves... but sometimes it feels like they're helping me out. I give them an initial shape, a direction, a past. And after that, it's mainly a matter of listening carefully to the voices in my head—the fictional ones, that is. 😉
