I have never been particularly good at creating one character.
I try.
I sit down with a notebook and think about a person.
Who are they?
What do they want?
Where have they been?
A sensible process.
Then someone else appears.
Usually without permission.
Perhaps the first character mentions a friend.
Or avoids mentioning one.
There is a photograph on a shelf.
A name in an old notebook.
Someone behind a counter who was only supposed to serve coffee and leave the story immediately.
They rarely do.
Characters have an inconvenient habit of arriving with history.
And history requires people.
A person does not become impatient alone.
Someone has tested their patience.
Loyalty needs somewhere to go.
Regret usually remembers a name.
Even loneliness is often shaped by the absence of someone specific.
This is where the trouble begins.
I ask who the person in the photograph is.
Then I want to know who took the photograph.
Why were they all together?
Do they still speak?
Who left first?
The original character is now waiting patiently while I investigate the life of someone who did not exist twenty minutes ago.
This may not be efficient.
I have stopped expecting efficiency from stories.
But I think there is something useful in the problem.
Characters feel more complete when the world does not appear to have started with them.
They should walk into a room where someone already knows their coffee.
They should have old arguments that do not require an introduction.
Someone should remember them differently than they remember themselves.
Especially that.
We are not the only authors of our own history.
Other people keep versions of us.
Some generous.
Some inaccurate.
Some annoyingly well documented.
Perhaps this is why characters rarely arrive alone.
Even when they enter the story by themselves, they bring other people with them.
Names.
Habits.
Debts.
Photographs.
A sentence someone said twenty years ago and probably forgot before dinner.
The writer’s mistake is assuming these things are background.
Sometimes they are.
Sometimes the person serving coffee refuses to leave.
And then, several notebooks later, you realise you were never writing about one character at all.
You were opening a door.
Apparently, other people had been waiting outside.
— D. Vaen