Why I Write Character-First
Content note: grief and bereavement, mental health.
For a long time, my writing always started in the same place. I'd free-write until something caught my attention, find a plot that interested me, and work out the whole story from start to finish. Only then would I add the characters, slotting them into the places the plot needed them to be.
On paper, there's nothing wrong with that. Plenty of brilliant writers work that way, and writing for plot or for reader satisfaction isn't a bad thing. But it never sat right with me. My characters were making choices because the story needed them to, not because it's what they would actually do. I'd bend them to fit, and every time, something felt a little hollow. Writing became more of a chore than something I loved, and for a long time I couldn't work out why.
Eventually, I stopped. Not in one big dramatic moment, but slowly, because I felt I didn't have a story to tell that I fully believed in. Even my short stories never felt right. I never read my own work back. Once something was finished and I edited it to the best of my ability, it was filed away and I never looked at it again. Looking back, it was like a job I hated that I wasn't even getting paid for. When something feels like that, it's no surprise you walk away. For a long time, I genuinely didn't think writing was something I'd come back to.
Life carried on. I moved about a bit. I had a couple of tough years. And then came the biggest change of all: my mum died, and I hit rock bottom. I won't pretend there's a neat lesson in that. Grief doesn't work that way. But in those dark moments, writing saved my life. It gave me somewhere to put everything I was feeling when I didn't know what else to do with it. The grief, the anger, the confusion: all of it went onto the page. I don’t mean writing stories. I was still a long way from that. I essentially kept a journal and used it, first, to channel my emotions. Then eventually the ‘what if’ scenarios started. Every different situation I created would end with how I felt I’d act in real life. Then the stories began to filter back in.
And something changed. I stopped writing to build a plot and started writing to understand. I began to understand myself, not only as a person but as a writer. I realised I could take real emotions and give them to characters, building them from scratch and asking: how would this person really react? What would they actually do, not what would be convenient?
When I went back to university, that shift carried into everything I wrote. I was writing for my assignments, but for the first time in years, I was writing for myself as well. I wasn't forcing anything anymore. I was following people. That's when the character-first approach really kicked into gear, and it's how I've written ever since. I still free-write, and I still find premises, but the outline is just that: an outline. Before I decide how a story ends, my characters are fully fleshed out. I know what they want, what they're afraid of, what they're hiding, and why.
The best part is that they surprise me. I'll start a story with a clear idea of where it's going, and then a character does something I didn't plan, because once I truly understand them, it's the only thing they would do. Some of my favourite twists have come that way, and I didn't see them coming until the characters showed me.
These days, I read my own stories. That might sound small, but I hadn't done it since high school. I believe in what I'm telling now. That doesn't mean every story is comfortable. There are characters I don't like, and endings I can hardly believe myself. Some readers won't like them either, and that's okay. Every choice is true to the characters, and that matters more to me than a tidy ending. It's something I'll never stop doing, whatever the backlash, because it's taken me a long journey to get here.
So, if you've stepped away from something you love, whether that's writing, painting, music, or anything else, here's what I'd say: it's never too late. Start today. Even if it's the smallest step, take it. I waited, and waited, before I finally decided to put my energy into the thing I love most. Writing is my escape, but it's also my passion, and I want to do it for as long as I can and share it with as many people as I can.
If my story tells you anything, let it be this: the break isn't the end. Sometimes it's where you find the version of yourself that was always meant to come back.
The break isn't the end. Neither is this.
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