☯ : Greatest challenge to writing your character?
For Leon, that’s usually staying positive all the time, or at least extremely polite. That means, among other things, not making any snide comments, even relatively innocuous ones, about people even when he doesn’t like them very much. Leon simply isn’t that kind of person, and I very much am, so any time I would be inclined to classify a person as “that dipshit from $place” or “the idiot who fell in the well last week” I have to remind myself that’s not how Leon thinks.
Since he does this even in private, it occasionally becomes a challenge for me to remember he’s just Not That Guy. And even if someone has actually pushed him to the point that they’re an enemy and he’s decided they’re safe to say mean things about, he saves them for when they’re most impactful and his word choice is usually different than mine.
He only really breaks this rule when he’s exhausted beyond rational thinking and his patience is razor-thin, because otherwise it’s as rigid as though his mum were following him around ready to snag him by the ear if he said a rude word to somebody.
For Terry, it’s the fact that he’s so bloody smart in ways completely opposite to me. His talents lie in technical things, engineering, spatial recognition, deconstructing objects, and internally doing math that he wouldn’t be able to do on paper. I am a visual artist first and foremost, and numbers and calculation in those terms has never, ever been my strong point. I can do basic arithmetic and all that but it’s a slow process and I have to write it out or I’m going to get it wrong.
Writing characters that excel in areas you don’t is fun, but occasionally really frickin’ frustrating because it’s not always the simplest task in the world to talk around a topic you don’t know in a way that suggests you totally do.
