How do characters come to life?

It’s not easy to write a living breathing bleeding character. But it is fun. As an author, I pretty well create the people I want to hang out with but in saying that 95% of my characters have rocked up to me and demanded I pay attention to them before I knew their names or their story.
Case in point, I did not know Ellie Conway’s name when I first started writing Killerbyte. I didn’t even know what she looked like. I was looking through her eyes.

I know, I can hear you … yes, originally Killerbyte was third person so technically I should’ve been able to describe my main character. But I couldn’t get a clear picture. Couldn’t even get a name in the beginning. We’re talking the very beginning of the writing process.

When I turned the story on its head and wrote it first person the story changed dramatically. The main character, our beloved Ellie Conway, stepped up. It took quite a while before I could confidently say who she was. Describing her was tricky. I did occasionally catch a glimpse of her in a mirror and that helped.

A few things changed with the POV shift but the main thing that occurred was me being able to be in Ellie’s head. I could see everything she saw, good and bad. (If I’m perfectly honest there are a lot of things she shared that I wish she hadn’t.)

Anyway, I started using music to help me slide into Ellie Conway. Certain songs kicked her into life so I could write what she saw, what she felt, smelt, tasted, heard. It didn’t matter what was happening around me as long as music was playing. 🙂
From the minute I stepped into Ellie that first time, as a first person POV character, the way I saw her world changed.
She was closer. The team were closer.
They all had heartbeats. Anything that happened in the stories impacted them as much as it would a blood and bone person.

Does every character begin like Ellie did for me?
No.
Does every Byte Series character have a song?
Yes.

Ellie Conway and Mac Connelly had their own MySpace pages back in the day. That was fun! Mac was getting hit on at an alarming rate. People thought they were real people and often asked them for help. (Despite their bios clearly stating they were fictional characters from the FBI based Byte Series.)
I had a list of as many helplines and whatnot that I could find for various states so that I could flick them to people who needed help. In the end it was just nuts. And I canned their pages.
Although Ellie does have an X account and has done for years. She’s not super active. 🙂
Mac had a Twitter account many years ago and that was run by a friend of mine. Even more amusing than his MySpace account. 🙂 🙂

The one thing they do have is a poetry book. The book that Ellie’s brother Aidan had published for them in Killerbyte.