The artist that I’m working with on “Mercury and the Murd” has been asking me questions about the characters. Very specific questions. Questions like “What is his favorite movie?” “Favorite band?” – stuff that certainly helps flesh a character out. And questions I can certainly understand wanting to know. If you’re going to draw something, it helps to know it. It allows you to add little touches of flair and present a character so full of detail that it looks like you’re drawing something/one that is sitting in front of you.

The only problem is that I don’t work that way.

It’s not that I lack the creativity (although I’m sure some of the smart alecks out there will disagree with that), it’s just that I don’t get down to the nitty gritty minutia of characters. I feel that that locks me into a pre-determined sort of path. However, I can and do set generalities for characters, but I let the specifics come as the story(ies) evolve. That, to me, is like a bit of magic. You’re watching a character grow as you progress and you get to know them a little more each step as you move along. For example, Fist of Justice was always a former Olympic boxer, I wanted him to get hooked on video games, he loves pizza, unashamedly liked disco music and was a huge Charm City Stallions fan. What I never said was his favorite game was “Call of Honor”, loves “Pizza Shack” pies, thinks “Night Dancing” by The Gee Bees is awesome and his favorite player of all time is Stallions quarterback John United.

And yeah, I have a weird fondness for altering real world stuff slightly for the worlds my characters inhabit.

Plus, I feel like getting too specific will almost force me into mentioning things for no real reason. I mean, if it’s there, why not use it? I’d rather the situation dictate that someone reveal bits about themselves and it keeps me guessing and on my toes. Say the story has Beck Mercury squaring off against some threat – his gun is gone, he’s stuck on top of a broken down school bus and he has no way to defend himself. The bad guy is getting a little cocksure and Beck notices a tall piece of pipe laying up against the side of the bus (maybe its in a junkyard). He thinks for a second and then says to himself “If I could reach that length of pipe, I could vault right over his head, land on that pile of old washing machines and duck behind them before he knows what happened.” Followed by “How hard could it be? Fred Ward and Kevin Bacon did the same thing on the rocks in Tremors to get away from those monster worms.” Just like that, I established he’s seen “Tremors”. From there we can assume he liked it and from THERE we can guess that he probably likes other movies like that. Is that the case? I don’t know. Yet. But that info is out there to play with however I feel like.

Is that the best way to approach creating and writing characters? Maybe not. But it works pretty well for me.