Playing God: What is Character Development and Why is it Important?
How I like to orchestrate my characters with the why of my story
We fiction writers get to play God.
We get to create whole worlds and populate them with fascinating or quirky people — perhaps our alter egos or some version of ourselves. Then we get to dump on them what actor Rod Stieger called a heap of trouble. The more the better.
And watch them sweat, then fight or crawl their way out of said troubles. Or not. The choice is ours.
With all that freedom comes responsibility. Unless we’re just writing for our own amusement, we want someone to read the darn thing. Hopefully lots of someone’s.
That means being mindful of what we’re doing and why. It helps if there’s a connection between who our characters are and the situations we put them in. Which I call–and please excuse the expression if it sounds crass — orchestration.
The novel I’m polishing began with a question. What if men got pregnant?
This came from a reproductive rights slogan: If men got pregnant, abortion would be a sacrament. My story focuses on a man who gets pregnant and wants and needs an abortion. In the world I created, medical science rushes to create the procedure…
