Creating My Novel’s Characters

It's interesting being a part of the publishing world now and getting a peek into author life. Every writer is different in terms of their style, process, strengths, and weaknesses.

Some authors base their characters on people they know. I don’t—or at least I didn’t for the Reign of the North Forest series. As character-driven as Imperious Realm is, I didn't based any characters on any real people. As it often happens in the writing process, my characters developed as I wrote.

I talked about this bit in my prior blog posts: What Inspired Me to Write the Reign of the North Forest Series and What is My Writing Process?

Like reading, writing is subjective. I think an author's style and personality will inevitably shine through their work in some way.

I don’t know if other authors do this, but I created my characters based on what I needed in the story. This might be because I needed certain personality traits to be able to address the central theme of discrimination in all the ways this manifests, especially since many of the characters work in leading positions in government. In this fictional world, I needed people to support dangerous ideologies—and of course, people combat them.

In return, the characters fuelled the story. I mentioned before that Sergen was initially a supporting character and became a protagonist when his backstory intrigued me. As I wrote, other characters rose (wrangled their way?) to meet the needs of the plot. Another great example is my character Ivar. In early drafts, Ivar had literally one passing mention in the entire series and now…well, you'll have to read about him.

I utilized real-life experiences mostly through my observations, incorporating small details in the setting or through various character quirks, sprinkled throughout the story. Raynor's positioning of his desk was based on my observation that people seemed to choose inconvenience for the sake of politeness: they wouldn't ask me to close my office blinds in the morning, so I would offer to do it for them. There are lots of other examples, but they're incorporated with the characters now, so I'm not even sure I would remember them all!

Anyway, that's a bit of insight into my characters. I have more books coming, and I hope you enjoy their character arcs!