Thursday, January 03, 2013

Where Characters Come From

If you've ever created stories -- whether written, drawn or filmed -- you are familiar with the experience of having the characters dictate where the story is going to go.  You may start out pushing the characters through your plot, but if you're doing your job right, the characters start to drive events and you, as creator, just follow them to see what's going to happen.

Author Corey Doctorow has an interesting idea about why this occurs.  If you make stories or want to make stories, it's worth reading in full.

1 comment:

Floyd Norman said...

Fascinating and totally believable.

I wrote dozens of stories for Disney and I still remember writing down what I heard the characters speaking. In my mind they were real, and they always drove the story. All I had to do was observe.