“I wrote a character this way. Should I have written them this other way?”

Short answer: No.

Long answer:

Characters tend to grow and evolve with the author and the draft. Your first iteration is highly unlikely to be identical to the final version. The key is to write write write and accept that the first draft is far from your best work in every possible way. It’s groundwork and just the beginning of a long and sometimes arduous journey.

How you write your characters is very personal to you. Unless you’re fishing for some kind of approval, you just write them however they feel at the moment. Don’t worry if they’re not perfect at first. There’s no such thing as a perfect person, but I can assure you characters just need time and space to breathe and grow. Your first version may be cringe when that’s not the intention, but give them time and thought and they’ll meander their way to being the best version of themselves they can be.

I’ll use Sylus as an example since he’s been my primary focus and has done the most evolving.

Sylus started as a personal trauma response. He was 100% a self insert and started out very much “not right”. He was on a journey to become himself. He was supposed to grow and change throughout the story, but I realized that made him incredibly fragmented and not himself. In fact, he would only be a shadow of himself until the very end of the story. That didn’t feel right to me. I’d hampered him with my own self doubt and it showed. He was so insecure and afraid, but I always loved him and even at his weakest I didn’t give up.

The more I wrote him, the more he told me what he wanted for himself. He even made a few executive decisions about his personality and appearance that I had no choice but to accept. It almost felt like I’d somehow offended this fictional character by portraying them any other way, but all those other versions needed to exist for us to get to where we are. There was never any reason for him to exist as anyone or anything but himself and with every draft, every iteration, he came closer to his truth.

In the process, I realized that making him whole meant working on myself. I said a while ago that if you’re not putting part of your soul into every character, they’ll struggle to come across as sincere. Maybe they don’t “talk” to you like they do for me, but that doesn’t mean they still aren’t connected to you. Which is why as you grow, your characters grow, too.

In the end, you must write how you feel. If your characters appear rough at first glance, that’s perfectly okay! But it’s up to you to get them to where you want them. It’s your job to worth with them on their growth. A group of anonymous know-it-alls won’t help you get there. Sure they might be able to say what is or isn’t believable, but that would become apparent to you as the author the more you work on your characters.

Give them room to grow and breathe and I promise you they will. In fact, they might even trash your plot and demand an entirely new one. I know mine did and I firmly believe it was worth listening to them.

Again, I’m no grand success story. Hell I’m not even published yet. I’m eternally in the WIP phase, but I’m getting there and I like to think I’ve learned a lot along the way. It’s hard for me to imagine writing a book and not loving every single one of your characters including the villains.

You have to write YOUR story and stop pining for the approval of others. No one can tell you how to write your tale. I mean they can, but then it’s not exactly yours anymore, is it? It will never be for everyone and if it is, you’ve done something very, very wrong.

Love your characters and grow along side them. You’ll all be better for the experience.

🦑💜🦇