One of the challenges of producing a work of fiction is control. How do you stop the massive, writhing mess of story threads and characters running amok? How do you ensure consistency of vision while keeping a tight rein on where your imagination is going?

Big question. Let's try to answer it in one specific but vital area: character. The people who populate a book are the eyes through which readers will see your story. Readers will, hopefully, have a relationship with them. There must be something in those characters that makes people want to know more about them, to care what happens to their lives, that gives them the will to read on.

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In order for this to happen they must be believable. And for that they must have some kind of consistency. They can't be physically strong and fearless in one chapter and weak and cowardly in the next. Physical descriptions -- hair colour, age, appearance -- must be constant. I'm not a great believer in absolute consistency in terms of personal traits and behaviour. In real life someone who is one hundred per cent predictable all the time would be considered dull.  It's the unpredictability in human beings that dictates whether we love or hate them, not the things they do day in and day out. Seems to me the same applies in books.
<p>But I digress. All authors need a mechanism by which they record the traits and appearance of their characters. Leaving it to chance or memory is a sure way of guaranteeing dangerous inconsistencies which may slip through, appear in a final manuscript, and label you as 'unprofessional' in the eyes of the reader. How do you do it?</p>
<p><a class="image-link" href="http://davidhewson.files.wordpress.com/2009/09/character.jpgwp-content/uploads/2009/09/Screen_shot_2009-09-29_at_08-full.40.38.png"><img class="linked-to-original" style="display:inline;float:right;margin:0 0 10px 10px;" src="http://davidhewson.files.wordpress.com/2009/09/character.jpgwp-content/uploads/2009/09/Screen_shot_2009-09-29_at_08-thumb.40.38.png" alt="" width="346" height="344" align="right" /></a>One way is to keep a simple record. Some writing software will even offer to do this for you. Here is <a href="http://www.storyist.com/" target="_blank">Storyist</a>, a Mac author's program, trying this approach. Does it work for you? Maybe. It's simple, doesn't require much thought, and gives you an 'ID card' to look at whenever you need to check out a character. Personally I don't like being nagged, particularly by software, but there you go.</p>
<p>This doesn't work for me for one very practical reason. I don't envisage characters fully formed before they appear in a work. I don't want to sit down and think them through beforehand. It seems an artificial way of working, unintuitive and, most importantly, out of sync with the way a reader will meet these same characters. They won't see your cribsheet here. All they will have to help them are the words in your book. <em>Nothing more</em>.</p>
<p>So my approach is to use those words to populate my character records. I have a rough idea of what someone looks like, their age, what kind of human being they are. Then, when they appear in the book, I just write them as I see them at that stage of the story. Note the word 'see'. I think visually as I write. This is very important to me. I need to visualise what's going on. Having some index card of a character pre-written would hinder this, not help it.</p>
<p>When I've finished writing the character then I  cut and paste the exact words I've written into a character entry in my book diary, kept in <a href="http://www.marinersoftware.com/sitepage.php?page=85" target="_blank">MacJournal</a> (and yes, you could do this in Scrivener too if you want -- I just like to keep things separate <a href="http://www.davidhewson.com/2009/08/writing-a-book-diary/">for the reasons outlined here</a>). Click on the image below for a better view and you can see how this works in practice.</p>
<p><a href="http://davidhewson.files.wordpress.com/2009/09/screen-shot-2009-09-29-at-08-32-42.png" target="_blank"><img class="alignnone size-medium wp-image-859" title="Characters" src="http://www.davidhewson.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2009/09/Screen-shot-2009-09-29-at-08.32.42-300x208.png" alt="Characters" width="300" height="208" /></a><br style="clear:both;" />This is the character section of the book diary for the ninth Nic Costa novel, <em>The Fallen Angel</em>, which will be out in 2011 (yes, it is finished by the way). Here is the character entry for someone called Agata Graziano. If you've been following my series you'll know that Agata is not new. She appeared in the sixth book, <em>The Garden of Evil, </em>and returns for this one.</p>
<p>So the starting point of her character entry? I just go back to <em>The Garden of Evil, </em>copy the text for her entrance there, and put it in my diary for the new book. All I see is what the reader sees. I find this makes much more sense than a pre-planned index card. I can go back and view her character in isolation, outside the book, make notes about things I need to address, then return to the manuscript and try to fix them.</p>
<p>This works for me. It may not work for you. Some people love index cards and thinking through a book before they start writing. I don't. It grows, organically, on the page as I write. There is no one-size-fits-all solution when it comes to creating a book. Just the solution that works for you. Finding that is all part of the daily struggle of writing.</p>