Character Evolution: How many times have you done this?

Have you ever written up a biography or summary of a character and thought "This is everything I know about my character and it is set in stone" but then about three months or so of working on them later, you compare your latest biography/summary with the first one and you are like "Whoa, they are barely the same person anymore!"

This happens very often with my villains, but less so with my heroes for some reason. I often adapt their "evilness" to whatever my mind sees as a reasonable concept of evil, and that changes surprisingly often.

This also happens because as I think of more obstacles and situations for the heroes to rise up to, I need to amp up the villain as well, resulting in much more craftier villains.

A funny case was when in a demon hunter story of mine, the Big Bad was a demon called Pain, he was a bloodthirsty Ax-Crazy psychotic monster, think Amon Goeth as a demon. After a lot of re-working on that story, the character somehow became a much more brutal and less cerebral character, ending up a Giant Mook Dumb Muscle who isn't much of a threat.

Going from Big Bad to Giant Mook is ONE HELL of a downgrade.

Yes. Quite often. The most extreme example I can think of would be a certain minor antagonist, who went from being an unspeakable bastard to someone incredibly sympathetic simply through their relationship with someone far less together than them.

I find this happening quite often, and indeed, my novel's cast of characters seems to be drifting even now. Often, when I alter major narrative and thematic elements within the framework of the plot, the characters most closely connected to those elements need a major overhaul. For instance, I've eliminated a whole secret society of manipulators, so anyone manipulated by them will obviously need their motivations changed. I'm reluctant to outright cut anyone, as I'd like to have a large cast of supporting characters and even a suddenly irrelevant individual can still be repurposed into something useful.

Maria Keshia, one-time student of Character University, has gone through the most iterations over time. Her personality has remained unchanged, but the details of her role in the plot have not. Is she The Dragon to a hidden manipulator, only pretending to wield power to deflect suspicion, or is her authority genuine? Are her petty, vindictive traits real, a case of Obfuscating Stupidity, or a mixture of both? Is the major plot twist she's involved in a case of planning on her part, or an accident of which she happened to be the center? The answers to those questions are perpetually up in the air.

edited 5th Nov '12 6:29:43 PM by BrotherMycroft

I tend to actually recognize and work on that sort of drift rather than merely having it happen. Looks more like intentional character development that way.

Generally speaking, in any work I plan out in advance, the "voice" of a character may drift some but their essential details will not.

With works I don't plan in advance (or at least not entirely), though, anything can happen.

A handful of the characters in my current work have been continually recycled from (scrapped) work to (scrapped) work and have been growing with me as a writer for as many as five years. Redone, overhauled beyond recognition, you name it. Now that I kinda know what I'm doing, my characters have finally begun to settle, and have stayed that way for the last year. That's better than can be said for previous years.

Most of my characters scarcely resemble the way they were when I had originally conceived them three or four years ago. Same goes for the heart and structure of the stories they are a part of. Still, there is at least one element from before that remains in each of them.

It is a very natural process for me. Usually for me no part of a character is set in stone form the beginning. Everything about a character may and will change as I develop the plot and the setting. Name, Age, motivations, abilities, relationships, even gender, are in a constant flux between different drafts. Only a few characters have solidiffied to the point of being considered complete, and it takes a complex net of interrelationships to set a character.