Sep 29, 2026 · 52 min · 10 segments
Pete Aldin and Bryan Chaffin explore how to make your characters more interesting, from finding unexpected flaws and contradictions to challenging your assumptions about who they are. They discuss…
Pete AldinHostBryan ChaffinHost
And I wanted to sort of start with the question of, are great characters discovered or designed? First of all, what do you make of that question?
Because it's all going to depend on the person, right? There are definitely people who design their characters and there are people who discover them.
And there's going to be a spectrum of people all in between those two different ways of
creating their characters.
There are going to be people who base their characters entirely on people that they know.
I can see how it would
It was the second project that I ever completed in terms of a novel way back, you know, 16 years ago.
And so, you know, my background from the 90s through the early 2000s was working as a church minister amongst other jobs I had.
Haven't been a church minister for 22 years now, but there was definitely some PTSD coming out of the particular denomination that I was in and coming out of that role.
And some of that was caused by some, shall we say, narcissistic personalities that that particular brand of religion attracted.
I'm not one of them, of course, but they tended to be the people who were kind of the more senior in the hierarchy.
One of my characters in that unpublished novel is 100% based, and that's the villainous character, or ostensibly the villainous character, 100% based on one of them with some other kind of components about other men that I met in that environment.
And I wanted to sort of start with the question of, are great characters discovered or designed? First of all, what do you make of that question?
Because it's all going to depend on the person, right? There are definitely people who design their characters and there are people who discover them.
And there's going to be a spectrum of people all in between those two different ways of
creating their characters.
There are going to be people who base their characters entirely on people that they know.
I can see how it would
It was the second project that I ever completed in terms of a novel way back, you know, 16 years ago.
And so, you know, my background from the 90s through the early 2000s was working as a church minister amongst other jobs I had.
Haven't been a church minister for 22 years now, but there was definitely some PTSD coming out of the particular denomination that I was in and coming out of that role.
And some of that was caused by some, shall we say, narcissistic personalities that that particular brand of religion attracted.
I'm not one of them, of course, but they tended to be the people who were kind of the more senior in the hierarchy.
One of my characters in that unpublished novel is 100% based, and that's the villainous character, or ostensibly the villainous character, 100% based on one of them with some other kind of components about other men that I met in that environment.
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