I’ve not done a whole lot of writing, truth be told. Certainly not before CFS launched in 2009. Sometimes I wonder how other people create stories. I don’t imagine the process other people use to get there is as weird as mine. It’s like I don’t want to know too much about who the people in my stuff are beforehand. I let what I need them to do decide who they are. Both comic series I’ve done, I came up with a setting, a premise, and a plot before I ever came up with a character. For this, I made a list. I decided it’d be 4 female, 3 male. I randomly assigned them ages between 16 and 19. And I tossed off 1-line personalities and families. “17. Idealistic. Talks a lot. 2 siblings, 1 older, 1 younger.” That’s the entirety of my character creation process. Then I drew heads ’til I had 7 I liked. And then I started dropping them into my outline and letting their personalities, mode of speech and whatever be what I needed to serve the plot from scene to scene, seeing who fit the roles, and they became who they are. Some of them hadn’t even been named yet as I was writing their introductions. Totally ridiculous.
And now, having written 50-odd pages of script, I feel like I know exactly who they are. It sounds so pretentious to me, but they kinda created themselves. I just change my notes if a character doesn’t act like I arbitrarily decided they would. Most of the relationships within the core group as I now understand them are very different from the first scene I wrote for them (Long abandoned). It just kinda happened. It’s all alchemy. Surely other people are more prepared before they’re doing the actual writing.