Nhys Glover – Characterisation: Getting Inside the Head of Your People

Characterisation: Getting Inside the Head of Your People

by Nhys Glover

Some people write whole biographies for their characters before they start writing. For me, I like to get to know the people as I go along, a bit like when we meet people in the real world. It’s the mystery that enchants me about writing and keeps me doing it. The ending it pretty much a given, as I write happy-ever-after Romance novels, so I have to have to be invested in how that’s going to happen.

The couple has to overcoming obstacles to be together. Some of those obstacles are internal, but as often or not, there are external ones as well. Because, for me, the external world is a reflection of the internal world.

Sometimes I get to a point in a story and think… ‘I need some exciting event to stir things up.’ In Lionslayer’s Woman, two of the protagonists were well on their way to achieving their goal: rescuing Galeria’s mother. But it felt too easy. When Nexus plans, he does a great job of it, and so there’s no tension in anticipating the outcome. So I needed a spanner. Galeria, in my head, put up her hand and said… ‘I could get in trouble. I don’t like the idea that we know another purge is going to take place and we’re not going to do anything about it. Maybe I get in trouble trying to stop the next one?’

So that’s the sort of thing I need. I know Galeria well enough by now. She’s a logical thinker, a Stoic philosopher, but she has the heart of a champion. My first introduction to her was when she rescued the other female heroine from rape by barging in to a pack of aroused men. If not for her muscular slave with a sharp sword she would have been in real trouble in that scene, so it’s no great stretch to see her going against her better judgement and ploughing in to try to save another Stoic family like her own.

But she’d not a fool. Going out alone into a strange city in the early hours of the morning is stupid. Therefore I had to see what rationale would make her do such a thing. So she’s sleep deprived, living off nervous energy because of her missing mother and the strain in her developing relationship with Nexus. She’s let her logic win so far, but her conscience is nagging at her over the Stoic family. When she’s finally decided to tell Nexus she wants to help them the next day, circumstance ups the ante. The attack is that night, in less than an hour. She has no time to think rationally, all she can do is act according to her personality.

I have to keep in mind that my people are not modern. My women often act as modern women would, (the reader needs to be able to relate to them,) but there is always a societal backlash associated with that. Galeria couldn’t do what she does if she’d been raised as a typical Roman patrician. She had to have a father who holds more liberal views, as the Stoics did. But her brother, who has just spent a year in the army, is more inculcated into Roman ethos, so he is the first one to condemn Galeria for her actions. He represents all of the mindless prejudices of the time.

For me, characterisation is always easy because I don’t think of my people as characters. To me, they’re as real, if not more real, than the people in my life. If I don’t get why they do something, I ask them. If my story needs ramping up, I ask them how to do it. I’m simply the facilitator of the story, I don’t come up it. My Muse prefers it that way.