When Characters Arrive Before the Story

I have been working on my second book for a while now. The world is beginning to exist, the characters are being born, and it continues to grow.

But I've noticed something slightly strange about the way some of those characters arrive.

I don't invent them.

They come to me.

Sometimes they appear in dreams. Other times they come from chance encounters in the real world, and those are probably my favourites. There is something wonderfully surreal about meeting somebody completely unexpected, in a place where perhaps they shouldn't be, and immediately thinking: you belong somewhere else.

One recent encounter involved an elderly gentleman sitting alone in a chair in the woods.

I was out taking photographs. There was no grand adventure taking place, just me, a camera and the landscape. Then suddenly there was this man sitting there.

It felt like walking into a passage from a book that somebody else had already written.

Those moments stay with me.

The Field Notes

I carry field notes with me pretty much all the time. There is another notebook beside my bed because dreams aren't particularly considerate about office hours.

When somebody appears who feels important, I write them down.

I try to capture them while the image is still fresh: their face, their clothes, their manner, perhaps something they said. Usually these characters are visually very strong. I can see them remarkably clearly from the beginning.

It's their purpose that's missing.

And I quite like that.

I don't immediately try to work out where they fit into a story. I don't decide that this person must be a villain, that one must provide a clue, and another needs to appear in chapter twelve because the plot requires somebody to do something useful.

For a while, I simply let them exist.

Giving Them a Face

There is another slightly unusual part of my process.

Once I've written a character into my field notes, I often describe them to ChatGPT and try to create an image of the person I've seen in my mind.

The first attempt is rarely quite right.

The face is wrong. They're too old. Too young. Too threatening. Too ordinary. Their clothes aren't quite what I remember.

So I change the description and try again.

Eventually something appears that makes me think:

That's them.

I print the image and put it with my field notes.

It isn't really because I'm worried I'll forget them. The visually strong characters tend to be almost impossible to forget. It's partly because I enjoy being able to show somebody else the person who, until that moment, has existed only inside my head.

There is something rather peculiar about holding a photograph of somebody who doesn't exist.

Although I'm not entirely convinced that they don't.

Everyone Has a Story

Even if somebody eventually occupies only a few paragraphs of a book, I like to imagine that they have their own backstory.

They existed before the protagonist walked into the room.

They had breakfast that morning.

They've loved people. They've lost people. They've made mistakes. They have memories nobody will ever ask them about. They have places they go when they aren't occupying the few pages in which we encounter them.

The reader may never learn any of it.

I may never write any of it.

But I think knowing — or at least feeling — that there is something beyond the page makes a character feel alive.

They're more than NPCs waiting around for the main character to arrive.

And sometimes I wonder whether one of these apparent bit players might eventually get impatient with me and demand a book of their own.

One character who has emerged while I've been developing the world of Book Two has already done something like that. I originally saw him occupying a particular place in the story.

Now I think he has an extraordinary story of his own.

I'm not going to tell you what it is.

Not yet.

I Haven't Met Them Yet

This is where things become slightly harder to explain.

I don't really think of these people as fictional characters.

Obviously, rationally, I understand that I'm writing fiction. But that isn't quite how the process feels.

I don't feel as though I sit down and construct a person from a collection of attributes.

Male. Fifty-something. Tall. Dark hair. Mysterious past.

That would feel like inventing somebody.

These people arrive more or less complete.

Sometimes they come through dreams. Sometimes the spark is a chance encounter with somebody in the real world. Occasionally I don't know where they've come from at all.

So perhaps somewhere in the world these people already exist.

Perhaps I simply haven't met them yet.

And I think that's why I'm reluctant to force them into roles before the story is ready.

Book Two is still growing. Its world is becoming clearer and its inhabitants are beginning to populate it, but I don't yet know exactly where everybody belongs.

Some may eventually become important.

Some may walk into a room, say half a dozen words and disappear forever.

Some might not make it into this book at all.

But that doesn't make them disposable.

Their stories can wait.

After all, they were here before I knew what to do with them.