On writing characters

Sci-fi is a literature of ideas, and I haven’t hidden the fact that, often, ideas excite me more than people. My books start with stimulating topics, science, and research, and are spurred on by questions that I have no good answers for. Where do characters come in, though?  Are they merely vessels or second-rate guests in a plot designed to focus on a clever idea? Of course not.

I only have a story when the characters show up. I’m not even exaggerating when I say characters “show up”. This is how it feels. A few days of incubation (like a virus), groggy head, zoned out, and suddenly they take over my mind. They meet each other, have conversations, get down to their business, and move the plot forward in ways that I couldn’t possibly have predicted at the beginning.

Hours and hours of research get thrown out of the window – characters just do their own thing. They don’t care about my carefully laid out plans. Crucially, they obscure the world and ideas from which they emerged from, because they have high emotional stakes. I always empathise with my characters, no matter how nasty they are. I strive to know them better, to understand them, to figure out why they behave in the ways they do.  

I get attached to characters, I confess. Finishing the first draft of a novel is usually the saddest part of the process. After that, characters have nothing new to say, and I’m left to edit the prose into something that makes sense to other people.