Last week I talked about how you can use logic to flesh out your characters and work out their backstory. This week I’m going to examine how you can use your characters in interaction with each other to help develop them further.

Let’s say you have a character, important to the story, but you’re having trouble getting a handle on them. They’re a bit one-dimensional.

Let’s also say you have a very fleshed-out character, that you know backwards, whose reactions and dialogue and so on are solid and consistent.

It can be very worthwhile to have these characters interact (whether or not the story calls for it). Make up a stressful situation, put them both into it and let it run. You may find that your solid character can draw something out of the one-note character, because your creative attention can be more on the latter than on the already familiar former. If nothing else, you can explore some possibilities. The scene itself is probably useless but you might find it throws up interesting quirks or backstory.

For an example from my own writing, I was having some trouble with the characterisation of Lily: given she’s a POV character, this is quite a problem. There’s a scene early on in which she interacts with a random soldier, basically telling him to eff off when he wants to buy her sister for the king (her sister, Augusta, has turned into a Mosaic, a soulless but beautiful and extremely valuable collector’s item).

As the story progressed and I knew more about the sequence of events, it became pretty clear that this random soldier actually has to be Hal, Simon’s sergeant (another example of how applying logic can help develop a story).

Great: Hal’s a very developed character. By having him and Lily interact, it gives me (or my subconscious) a chance to explore more facets of Lily’s personality and the ways she reacts to stressful events. I don’t have to worry too much about thinking about how Hal might act – I know what he’ll do and say as an automatic consequence of his personality. Therefore I can focus a lot more creative power on Lily.

There are other times these two characters interact; those scenes may or may not be necessary in the end, but there’s nothing wrong with writing scenes that won’t be used if it helps your characters help each other into full-bodiedness.