Characters in your head

     I've always felt to be a good writer you had to be just a little touch of crazy. I feel this way, because of the need to create fully developed characters for your books. Characters tend to take on a life of their own in my stories, and they don't always react the way I thought they would or wanted them to in the situations I place them in. Often times it's a learning curve with each of them from the moment of conception to when I finally feel like I have a good handle on who the character is.
     Often times my characters start as an idea or a name. One of my characters in a story I'm planning for the future, but that I haven't started in on yet began life simply as a name that inspired me. Others have started out as an idea for a character that fit within a story, and I built on them from there. Either way that they get their beginnings, I always try to figure out what my character's present state is first and how their past got them there. I try to figure out what hardships they've gone through, what their happy times were like and how they feel about where they are at the start of the story. From there I let them be shaped by the events that take place in the book just like we are all shaped by the events in our lives.
     An example I could use is Leo Briggs from my book Gabriel. Leo got his beginning in a rough character outline that I did for this story in which one of my characters was going to be the Sheriff. From there I built on the relationships he had with the other main characters from being Anne's brother to Mackenzie being his deputy and how he viewed Blaise's relationship with his sister. As I made some of these connection I learned a little about the character, how he had a bit of a temper but was in general a good guy; he did his job well and was maybe a bit of a workaholic; he fought with his sister but they rarely stayed made at each other long. These little bits and pieces came together, and eventually I formed that he'd lost his wife in an accident and that it had made Leo far less carefree than he had been before. A lot of what made up Leo in the end you don't get to see in the book (or even less so this paragraph), not all of his past was relevant to that particular story even though it had helped formed him as a person. In the end, Leo was one of the strongest personalities to come through for me while writing that book. He had an opinion on just about everything.
     In the end I feel like your characters often are your story. Don't get me wrong, you have to have a good plot to throw them into but how they react is a big part of it. You can have an amazing plot and if your characters fall flat in their personalities or they react in ways that make no sense to some established trait from before it can make that plot line stumble and fall. Your characters need to be people, not just the mannequins you place in the story just to have a body there. Let your imagination wander a bit, write down the history of your characters if you need to and find out little things like what they like to drink or what's their favorite season. It may seem silly, but in the end it can help make the difference between a character that comes off manufactured and one that people feel could be real.
And, just so you know...Leo loves lattes with a bit of a spiced flavor like cinnamon or gingerbread, though if he can't get one of those a plain black coffee will do just fine.