Never underestimate just writing

As I’ve mentioned a couple of times, I’m writing a story. Main char: Allie, secondary MC: Jake. Jake and Allie work for a company fighting a hostile alien species (okay that’s not really it but just go with it). Allie walked into my head almost fully formed, but I decided to discard my initial character outline for Jake. I waited for weeks for some little hint of what Jake would be like, but as the most insignificant people began to get firmed up I decided to take matters into my own hands. I’d heard sitting down and typing whatever comes into your head helps when stuck at a point in a story, and I tried applying it to this. Here is the result.

I’m having problems with my MMC. The only thing I know about him is that his parents are dead and for some reason he feels guilty about this, and feels he could have prevented it. This has made him very hard, an often ruthless killer.

However, he is not always depressed. He gets very lonely sometimes, and doesn’t like to show it, although his closest friends can tell. This is why he is very pleased when Allie turns up.

And his name is Jake something, I can’t remember.

See, I’ve run aground again. Hmmm. So let’s describe what he looks like. He has medium to dark brownish hair, sometimes which falls over his eyes when he hasn’t cut it in a while. However, he has light blue eyes.

He tends to dress… fairly casually in jeans and a shirt or T-shirt. He looks gorgeous in tux.

I really need to get his personality sorted out, without turning him into Doctor Who or Faramir. I think a touch of Faramir’s loneliness when we get to know him should be obvious, as well as the Doctor’s guilt and anger during battles. I don’t want to make him too needy, nor do I want his neediness to be his attractive point.

I need to work on the reason his parents died, because I think that will unlock a lot of doors. So, how could they die, with him feeling guilty for not being there? Or perhaps he could be there, but be helpless? No, that would get too complicated and fantasy like. So, they die when he wasn’t there… they die because he wasn’t there? It could be a harmless accident.

It happened when he was 20, six years ago. He was supposed to pick them up from the airport, but he was too busy with… something, so he told them to take a bus. It was involved in a massive crash, House style. He’s never forgiven himself.

So what could he think was so important that he couldn’t pick his parents up from the airport? It can’t be trivial, because I don’t want him to sound like a dick. Although… maybe it should be something, and then he can change? That’s quite a nice idea, and yet I’d like the guy to appreciate his parents. Still, I suppose I can make it obvious that he loved them afterwards. He can be sorry that he took them for granted. All of this can come out at some point in Book 2¹, which will represent him really trusting in her.

Ok, so something of medium importance, which he was able to drop, but was inconvenient. Not necessarily something affecting him personally, though he blames it on his self importance.

Oh, I’m really stuck now. What are the options? It could be relating to work or his personal life. Not personal life, because nothing would be that important, and would also make him look like more of a git. So, work… he’ll still be at University at that point. What is he studying? I bet it’s a Joint Honours thing, the nerd. He’s an engineering kind of guy… can you study engineering and something? I just searched through the UCAS website and you can do engineering (civil/aeronautical but we don’t have to go into that) with French, which should be useful when they all go to Switzerland.

So, at 20 he will be in his second (or first) year at uni, depending on if he takes a gap year to work or not, which they like you to do for engineering. However, better make it second, because lots of people work too much in second year after doing no work in the first. What could he be doing in his second year, which is too important to pick up his parents?

Oh my goodness this is so hard. I think the problem is that I don’t know what engineering students are likely to do.

Ok, after having researched second year engineering students’ timetables etc at Cambridge (you can do it with a language yay!), there is nothing remarkable going on, beyond lectures, project/coursework and deciding what to do in third year. I might as well go with working on project, details TBC, with other people in group, and too busy/excited to pick his parents up. If it makes it better, the project can be one that actually started to be used by a company, it was so good.

Hmm, that kind of sucks, but I’ll go with it for the mo.

It worked. Jake is firmly up there at the top with Allie as my favourite and most interesting people to write about and explore their characters.

1. I’ve split the story up into three parts/books so far [↩]

Tags: character, Jake, loves, story, Writing