Demon Soul the making of part 3: surprise characters

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On the last part of the making of, I introduced the notion of surprise characters. Now I think I should explain a bit more about them. As you start writing the story, you have few characters’ lives evolving in a certain environment. Of course they are going to encounter other people and react to them, they will become enemies or friends. As you start writing a paragraph, either you have planed it a long time ago or you know the character really well, either the character is a stranger.

It is a bit like in real life when you meet your friend’s friend and you already have the feeling that you know him because your friend has been talking about that guy for month or you arrive to a new place and someone start talking to you.

When Sahel has to go to the demon world, I was already prepared to make him meet the bad guys. That was the obvious thing to do, my bad guys were all ready and I knew them so well, the one that appear just for a minute but could have become important if needed or the one that were already there to make trouble. What I didn’t realize at first was that I was going to create a new world call the demon world and that it needed to be as diversified as the world where Sahel was coming from. When Sahel takes his first look at this world, some of the people present are just as foreign to me as they are to him and I will call them "surprise characters". Some will stay basic and never interact with him, in that case he is just observant and the characters aren’t really developed. Some will start interacting with him and in these cases I just have to go back to my questions and lists to build them up while Sahel was discovering them.

Those characters are a surprise for me, they are something that the story is giving me because they need to be there and I didn’t realize while planning. The main reason why you can’t realize everything while planning is because the part that the characters decide to bring to the story is their own and even if it follows the main line of the plot, all the details can only be worked out while actually writing the story. That is a good thing because if you already knew everything about the future of your characters, the little drop of mystery that makes the story interesting would be lost.

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Demon Soul, the making of part 2: Creation of the characters

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I always start creating a story with a quick idea that will later give the beginning. Here that was Brownie staying alone when Yue left. As this is the start of the story you can imagine that at this particular point I was supposed to go further and to start writing what follows. Of course I will but I still had a little bit of something to do first and that was creating my main character Brownie. That for, I use questions and lists.
Questions are really basics first and tend to get more complicated. For instance you can ask yourself what is the favorite color or food of the characters so that it will determine the environment around them like the decoration in their bedrooms, how they react to the meals. And also give some basic characteristic about them, like for example what they look like. The look was easier a bit as I use a game so I could basically see their pictures.
And here, I also had to wonder what happened between Yue and Brownie, why they felt in love? Why they separated? Why Brownie was behaving the way she did? For each answer I write a little paragraph that would eventually appear or not in the story. For example some of what happens between Brownie and Yue appears as flashback or memories.
I also said that I use lists. That is main qualities and main default of the characters. Also a bit of what they like and dislike and for each of those I also write a little paragraph. It is really easy to give a list of quality and default. Writing a paragraph about how the character gets it will allow you to have a consistent behavior and to make sure that the characters doesn’t behave contractor to themselves. The list doesn’t have to be long. You can start with 5 qualities and 5 defaults, you can always add more as the story progresses.
So here was the birth of Brownie and of her relationship Yue. I also created Yue in the same way. He would of course stay a lot less developed than Brownie as he appears only through her.
The other characters will be created as they appear. I have a all bunch of very basic characters just ready to be developed, for example when I first needed Gideon, I knew he was a wizard and really good with his magic wand but that was about it. I had to start with the questions and lists to built him a past and see how he was going to develop in the story and how the story was going to develop around him. And that is valid for every character in the story even insignificant ones. You never really know when a character is going to do something remarkable so you need to be prepare when this day come, but as I said before as the relationship between the characters and the story is very narrow, you don’t need to prepare them all before the story you can create them during the story. That allows you to take a break from the plot and especially you can always introduce surprise characters like the twins, Taram and Torin or Seti.

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Demon Soul, the making of part 1: A very narrow relationship

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I truly believe that you can’t have a great story without great characters and at the same time you can’t have great characters without a great story.
Characters are a bit like the people you know in real life. So you have to ask yourself whose story you like to listen to better, the story of the guy telling you his last travel in Southern Asia, the story of the guy who went to the parasite museum or the story of the guy who spent his last week of holiday watching TV. For me, if you read this blog, you already saw the choice.

That doesn’t mean that I don’t like boring character, for example I truly think that Isakael, my angel is really boring. But the thing is that a character is like a person, it needs a good reason to be boring.

Before entering the story, each character lived (except Sahel, right) so before entering the story, each characters needed to have their own story, something that will determine their behavior and point of view and feeling and actions. (More about that in the Character series)

Before starting, the story needs someone there to do something. That’s how stories starts, something happens and there is no coming back. The story makes the characters move forward and the characters make the story take the path that only them with their own background can give to it.
If you are familiar with this blog you would now that the story would have been really different for example if Hitomi had been the main character instead of Brownie. She wouldn’t have done the magic by herself without Gideon and the outcome would have been totally different.
The narrow relationship between the story and the character force me to develop them in parallel, even though I still start with the main characters. But you will soon understand why.

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