Writing a Doctor Who Short Story - Part 6 - The End

So, for characters, it's a bit like doing a difficult Sudoku puzzle. First up is your Main Character, represented by a little "1". Now, by themselves, a character is kinda nothing, just a personality surrounded by a void. You can come up with the greatest character in the universe, but they'll suck if they have nobody to talk to, so you create "2", the 2nd lead. Sure, now you can get a lot out of them, but what do they really think about "2"? Best they talk to "3" about that. But wait, 3 and 2 don't get along, so now they need someone else to break them up... and so on and so forth until you've got all the pieces you need to fill the puzzle. Whenever I'm in the "this character sucks" part of writing anxiety, the answer is normally not a fault of the character, but of what's going on around the character. You can't place a "1" if you don't know what "2" - "9" are doing. Maybe there's nobody to bring out a certain flaw, or maybe the plot isn't pushing them enough. I've found that by tweaking the stuff around the character, the character grows stronger. Sure, sometimes you'll need to rub a lot of pencilled in numbers out to fix a problem, but that's OK. That's writing. I'm currently exorcising an entire character from the plot because they've become superfluous. It hurts like hell to lose them, but now my main character has a much stronger relationship somewhere, and I can make that relationship hurt like hell when I test it. From my (limited) experience, you'll only ask yourself the question "are these characters good enough" if they aren't. You're not really asking the question, you're just wondering why your story telling instincts are clicking with your ideas. That's OK though, it just means that you need to work on it more. I hated The Paradox Paradox for the first six months. Then, a single piece fell into place and the solution opened up in front of me. Within two weeks the story and cast had been redone and now I've stopped asking the question because now I know it feels right. It's not 100% there yet, but it's on the right path and I can feel it. In conclusion, read more books, study story structure, trust your instincts and don't be afraid to burn it all to the ground and build on what survives.

Nerd³