On Writing

To me, character development has got to be one of the most fascinating and rewarding aspects of writing. I used to really struggle with that; my characters always felt rather cardboardy or two dimensional, their voices lacking in individuality. It was only when I started to study screenwriting that things really started to click for me. For the first time, I felt I had some tools with which to enrich my written world. When you're writing a screenplay, you don't have 500 pages to spend describing someone's innermost psyche or even their physical appearance. At best, you have a couple sentences, but by and large, the description takes place in the action itself, in the dialogue. I decided to take the same approach with my prose writing and returned to the manuscript of my novel to go over the characterizations and beef them up.

Character bios are the single most powerful tool I have ever learned for writing. Not only do they describe the character's background, but it covers their key strengths and weaknesses, their hopes and fears, their beliefs and even their habits. So at first it was simply a matter of getting to know everyone and figuring out who I was dealing with. For example, in Oddny Einarsdottir, there are working class characters and nobility, and they would need totally different behaviors, outlooks, and manners of speech. Foreigners like Kjartan needed to match their origins and beliefs. And above all, I always strive to give my main characters (and even some side ones) distinctive habits in talking, like always finishing a sentence with "then", or starting a question with "and".

Nowadays the first thing I do when embarking on a new story is to sit down with my writing journal (more on that later) and draw up a bio for each of my main characters. Really outline the who, what, and why. These notes make an invaluable reference while writing and help to keep things in character when I start to get derailed or things become flat. Even as I am writing, I will go back and refine or elaborate on them.

I'm still honing this skill set and probably always will be, but already it has exponentially improved my writing, breathing new life into previously languid characters and adding that elusive third dimension. In a sense, I would hazard to say that every writer should try screenwriting for a little, just to sharpen their descriptive abilities through dialogue and action. Prose can become a sort of crutch.