Anyone else here a “method writer”?
Like, before you can write anything for a character, you meed to spend an hour thinking about their backstory so you know how they’ll react?????
Ironically (maybe), I have to do this the least for my OCs; I have an idea of their childhoods etc., this is the personality they have after that, fleshing out backstory is easy because everything from there will be consistent.
Just open up a a scene in my head, and watch the characters as they go through it naturally.
Fan fiction, however? Even - especially!!! - the fluffy stuff I just do in my head as a distraction?
I keep having to stop, consider the characters’ childhoods (since that rarely gets explored in shows), try to figure out situations that would be consistent with the eventual canon personality, then start up the scene again with this new information and see how they react.
Sometimes I feel like a marionette operator, but the strings are on the scene: No, the character wouldn’t do that, so the scene can’t proceed with that outcome, time to shift things around until the character will do something else consistent with their personality but moves the plot in the right direction…. Let’s try a metaphorical millimeter in this direction….