The independent lives of your characters

[— Karen Myers —]

You know all those folks in your story/novel/series? The ones that put on a play under your direction to entertain your readers?

Well, guess what… they have their own lives, too. You can’t just deflate them and then blow them up again several chapters (or books) later, as if they hadn’t had their own experiences in the meantime, sometimes even events that change them in significant ways.

The problem with figments of your imagination is that your brain doesn’t really make much of a distinction between what you expect of real people and what you expect of fictional ones. The more static your fictional characters are and the longer the time frame, the less convincing they are as simulacra, even if they started out as perfectly well-formed archetypes. Like your co-worker who returns from vacation with a sunburn, a hangover, and a brand new wedding ring, you know he just isn’t quite the same as the last time you saw him, and you want to hear at least some of his story.

I’m working on book 3 of a not-yet-released series, so I have the luxury of really solidifying the worldbuilding before the first book goes out into the wild. I don’t myself know what’s going to happen with all these characters, not even the core contingent, especially because this is intended to be an open-ended long series. I like to “write into the dark” and be surprised by my characters’ choices, with only a key-points plot structure to keep the story’s events and rhythm well distributed in each series book.

So what am I learning this time?

I’ve never before waited to finish a third book before releasing the first ones. My choices for my earlier books in earlier series limited my choices for later entries, of course, but since I had only envisioned 4 books each for my prior two series, the events overall were fairly short-term in the story world (a year or so), and so it wasn’t so difficult to accommodate the character choices and changes in the later books as they came along.

This series is different. The 2nd-4th books will cover a year, and the 1st book is a prequel (5 years previous). But since I know this series will go on and on, my mind can’t stop fabulating into the future. So for instance… I just thought of a good opening for a later series entry — but it means that one of the earlier entries ought to notice a particular building (which I hadn’t thought about before) to provide an appropriate foundation for the later book’s opening.

Of course, the time will come when the first books are out and unmodifiable, and I’ll just have to work with that. But meanwhile that doesn’t stop the busy brain. It wants to get started on book 5, even though all it has visualized is the mid-point crisis. And I can’t afford to get distracted while working on book 3.

And then there are the core characters. There will be romances, marriages, births, deaths, disasters, and so forth. Of course there will. But there are only so many core characters you can keep track of, and ideally the life events have to stretch out over the long-term or else you start aging them in a hurry to move along a generation.

Let’s not forget the non-core but continuing characters either. Just how many names and (at least fragmentary) life stories do you think your readers can keep track of (even with a name index)? On the one hand, you don’t want to multiply these characters promiscuously, but on the other, one does keep meeting new people in real life, and running across older acquaintances. Fold these demographics in on each other how you will (introducing friends to friends), still the numbers do keep growing.

How do you keep your critters corralled? How do you group the different classes together (main characters, secondary, villains, peripherals, etc.), while keeping your story moving at a moderate pace through time, season by season?