Where to start with your story?
Nearly 30 years ago, I was living with my dog in my first solo apartment—a beautiful space that had once been a luxury hotel but was now in a rough part of town. The lot across the road was empty, someone had been stabbed on the corner, and the streets and doorways were littered with all sorts of strange things, including a single slice of Wonderbread that I noticed one morning as I walked my dog before work.
For me it was a lonely time. I was just out of college, trying to make new friends, and if it hadn’t been for my dog (who looked a lot like the one in the photo), I don’t know that I would have made it. I remember one morning, though, looking into her eyes and seeing so much love in them. It struck me as an utter miracle to be able to share my life with a creature who was not human, and to know, even so, that there was real love between us.
That moment stuck with me. We can love and be loved by those who are not like us.
And I think this is where stories start—with love.
It’s true that there are many doorways into a story. The Game of Love and Death came to me as a concept. What if Love walked among us? What would Love think of the way human beings love one another?
The same with Into the Bloodred Woods, which started with the observation that the Pied Piper is always made out to be the villain. But he wasn’t. He was a musician who did a job and wasn’t paid. The townspeople were corrupt.
Neither of these concepts would have amounted to anything, though, without character. However you find your way into your story, the way you will breathe life into it is through your characters—and most especially, by loving them for all of their specific idiosyncrasies.
A couple of days ago, I was listening to the audio book of The Thursday Murders Club by Richard Osman, and a funny example of this struck me. A group of elderly people was talking and one of them mentioned a bottle of wine that cost something like 8 pounds—which meant it was “quite a good bottle.”
It’s possible to have a decent bottle of wine for that money, but as good wine goes, that’s on the inexpensive side. And the detail reveals so much about the character—that she noted the cost of the wine and that she considered that to be high. It’s a charming way to reveal that she’s a bit provincial, and it all felt so natural and fun, not to mention loving on the part of Osman. He identified and revealed one of his character’s quirks in such a way that I believed her and enjoyed her and could feel that he did, too.
This is what we want to do with our characters. It’s not about making them likable, although that can be useful. It’s about filling them with life, because life is fascinating and being able to see evidence of it—whether it’s in the eyes of a beloved dog or the dialogue of a character—is wondrous.
So how do you do this? There are so many ways and this is one of the core challenges of writing a story.
But since we’re talking about beginnings here, we can start with what we know about our character. In the beginning, we can know certain things.
I’m not a fan of filling out generic worksheets. Not at all. For one, that feels like homework. For a second thing, your worksheet for every book should be different. What is the story about? Your worksheet should be asking character questions with that theme in mind—and that’s the problem with the generic ones.
What I like to do is informed by my experience writing game questions for Cranium and for Trivial Pursuit. It’s not enough to have a question with an answer. Not all of those are interesting. But when you have one that sparks an emotional connection, you make your players feel included and you give them a little zing of feeling.
What’s your emotional connection to your characters? That’s a clue to what your story will be about. And it’s a great way to get to know them.
What makes you care about your protagonist? What makes you worry about them? What do they do that makes you laugh? What do they think is expensive? What‘s their comfort food and why? What mistake do they keep making? If they could make three wishes, what would they be—and which one would be likely to get them into trouble?
And this: What has happened to them that they always remember?
I will always remember looking into the eyes of my dog and loving her, just as she remembered that slice of Wonder Bread that was on the street.
That night, as I let her off the leash before unlocking the apartment door, she took off running. She wanted that slice of bread. She’d wanted it all day, and the second an opportunity arose, she took it. She wanted to make sure she got the whole thing down before I took it away, so she was hunched over it, chewing wildly. It was disgusting.
But I let her have it. I could see that meant the world to her. She meant the world to me. And that’s how love works sometimes with our characters. They can do things we’d never do. They can make wrong choices. But we understand why. We let them do it. And we love them through the aftermath, and in the waning light of day, in those minutes before the street lights have clicked on, we walk them home.
