Question: How do you come up with the characters for your books?
Callous as it sounds, mostly it depends on what I need them to do in the story. :) I hear a lot of talk about plot-driven books versus character-driven books, but my own impression on the subject leans more towards the idea that plot and character cannot be usefully separated from one another. But from the aspect of a writer who has a deadline and who needs to be able to plan and reliably produce a reasonably good story, I tend to make things easy on myself whenever I can. I figure out what I need a character to do in my story, and then I build a character who would do it.
I needed someone to provide both threat, motivation, and distraction for Harry in Storm Front, for example, and got two characters who could do those jobs. John Marcone got to show up as the negative criminal element in the story, the human face of lawlessness and crime. Karrin Murphy is his opposite number, representative of the law, society, and order.
Neither one of them seems to do much for Harry that doesn’t make his day worse and worse, nine times out of ten, but no one’s perfect. :)
Bob the Skull came about in the same way. In fact, he’s something of an in-joke for the writers in the program at OU. Debbie Chester, my writing teacher, often warned us about producing an old and worn-out trope for our stories, called ‘talking heads’. Talking heads are characters with no real purpose in the story other than to show up and explain something so that the reader can get what’s going on. I knew that I was going to need a character who could explain things about magic to Harry (and through him to the reader) so that the magic ‘rules’ would hold together and make sense. So just to be a smart-alec to my teacher, I made a literal ‘talking head’ for Harry, who gets to serve as an adviser, a information source and an annoyance--I can’t plan a character, these days, without figuring out how it’s going to drive Harry nuts.
Source: WizardsHarry.com - Interview with Jim Butcher
Date: April 6, 2001 (?) (Earliest Archive Date)
