Sitting here with a toothache eating up one side of my face and wondering why ibuprofen gives me such stellar dreams, unless it was the combination of CBD gummies and Pinot Noir I tried before giving in to the chemical help. And partly because of the people in those dreams—such details you don’t want to know—I’ve been thinking about how I create characters.

The smartass response to the question “Where do you get your characters?” is the same as the smartass answer to the “Where do you get your ideas?” question, beloved of readers and other people at writer events. Why, from the idea store, of course. Why, from the character store, of course.

But flippancy aside—blame the gummies—there are all kinds of ways a writer goes about creating characters.

Some people use actual templates to build a character. I had a student once who wrote out a three-page list of personal history, physical, emotional, and behavioral characteristics she would have to know before she felt as if she could write a character well enough. I have a hard enough time writing a one page synopsis for my editor—if I did that much thinking for each of the ten to fifteen characters in a new book, I would feel as if I had already squeezed all the juice out of them. No more surprises left. And I need surprises when I’m writing.

That’s probably the most extreme example of using prework to build a character. My style, unsurprisingly to me, is somewhat lazier.

My characters emerge slowly from the actual writing of the story I’m working with. My writing process, if that’s not too definitive a word for it, is to write many (7 to x) drafts of a novel from start to finish, the whole thing at once. (I’m not one of those fortunate souls who can write parts and pieces out of order and stitch them all together later. I’d be too worried the stitching would show.)

In the course of each draft, the characters (always assuming I’m not working in a series where I understand something of the recurring characters already) emerge gradually from the layering of incident, description, dialogue, and narrative, exposing themselves through their participation in the story as it unfolds. On the fly. (Because I don’t write outlines, either.)

So the book, the story, ideally, deepens and widens with each draft and the characters emerge more fully through each subsequent iteration. Which is not to say I have no idea who a character is when I start.

For example, the core of the character of Ardmore Theberge in The Last Altruist

came to me from the story of Eddie Gallagher, the Navy SEAL who was charged with fatally stabbing an injured 17-year-old ISIS prisoner, photographing himself with the corpse, and sending the photo to friends. Half his military unit tried to pretend it hadn’t happened; half tried to see that he was brought to justice.

I started out to wonder what a man, a fellow soldier who stopped someone from doing something like what Gallagher was accused of and paid the military and personal price, would be like. So the central fact of that character was that he had protected the dead man. Through the book, as it developed, it became clear that Theberge was taking on the role of protector of all, of friends and lovers and all the other people he encountered who were less able to take care of themselves. But I didn’t have a clear idea how that one central notion would round into his character until I wrote the book, again and again.

The obvious benefit to doing it this way is that the action of the story and the description of  the characters integrate as the story unfolds. I know as I’m going along whether a character would do what the story is trying to make him do or if I have something wrong in the narrative. Writing the story whole brings an integrity of character and action.

Names are important. I find it hard to name characters in advance. In the same way their characteristics rise from the writing, a name has to be consistent with the character. This means the character has to develop a little first before I know his or her name. In the Elder Darrow series, I only came to his name after writing enough of the first book to realize I needed the character to be part of an old-line New England family. The name had to have the flavor of both history and New England Brahmin origins. “Elder” harks to the names of the old Yankee preachers; “Darrow” has the four-square feel of a Mayflower-family name. And so on.

But, I admit, there are oodles of ways to skin a felis.

If I could wish for another way to build characters, I think I would wish for a more visual method. I know writers who see their characters (in their heads, obviously) and it seems that would confer a very big advantage in rendering them, describing them at least. But, as

Popeye says, I yam what I yam. And I’ll have to deal with that part of my character.