I Made A Person

 

Lily? You bite your lip, nope there’s no room for nicknames there. Elsa? You cringe as you remember your Frozen phase. Sydney. As soon as you hear it, you know it’s the one. The perfect name for your main character. You briefly wonder if your parents put this much thought into your name. You shrug, you actually do like your name, now if only people would pronounce it right. You turn your attention back to your character, Sydney. Her friends are going to call her Syd, you decide. That’s the fun part of being a writer, you get to pick your character’s names and nicknames and pet peeves and more often than not, they all contain tiny parts of you. Sydney is going to be a reader, maybe a burnt-out reader, a girl who could read three 300-hundred-page books in a week when she was 12 and now struggles to finish a seven-page short story. You discard the idea of her being a ‘Nancy Drew’ really quickly. She has to be weird and impulsive and have a family that survives the ‘kill everyone who cares for the protagonist for tragedy’ trope.

You sigh, you hate descriptions, they never flow in your mind easily like dialogue does. Anyway, you already know what Sydney looks like in your head. Your reader needs to know it too, your well-meaning editor tells you, we need to know what she looks like. You bite your lip again, it’s going to start bleeding soon, but you can’t help it. You close your eyes, she has shoulder length hair, dark and wavy. She’s desi, obviously. She chooses comfort over fashion, although she does like to dress fancy every once in a while. Sydney seems to be doing pretty well so you now focus on her best friend Bethany.

Bethany’s conventionally gorgeous, that’s for sure. She’s also really good at math. She’s logical and analytical unlike Sydney who wings most of her decisions *coughs*. You smile as you think of the people Bethany is modelled on. You have a file on your notes app filled with random dialogue between Sydney and Bethany. That’s just how it works for you. Dialogue is what helps you flesh out your characters and dialogue is what comes naturally to you. You wouldn’t believe that the best scenes you ever created were based off dialogue if you weren’t the one who had, well, written it.

You close the word document, satisfied with the amount of work you’ve done today. You now have a basic idea of what your main character looks like and what kind of person she is. Now the only thing left to do is to put her in increasingly dangerous and funny situations and see if she sinks or swims. You’re pretty sure she’ll make it to shore. Yup, Sydney’s a fighter.