The Evolution of My Main Character

3 minutes

In my first post, I shared Chloe’s story. TL;DR: she started out as an angry, abandoned, and hard-working teenager trying to scrape by for a living.

But in this post, I’ll share the details of how we progressed from a Sim to a fleshed out character.

The first thing to change was her age.

When I decided to write this book, I immediately knew that she couldn’t be a teenager. I wanted to write a mature romance that involved my actual flaws.

As I’m 24 at time of writing, my flaws today are extremely different than my flaws in high school, so I knew Chloe couldn’t be a teenager anymore.

The second thing to change was her environment.

As someone who was blessed with financial security my whole life, I knew that I did not want to try to write a story about someone who was actively in poverty. I wanted to focus my time and energy on the romance and character development, not researching how to accurately portray poverty.

The AI-generated story that inspired me to seriously write this book had Chloe living in the city, gardening on the rooftop. But I’m a massive fan of Stardew Valley, cottagecore, and folk music like Andrew Montana – I wanted to write a story about a garden in the countryside. (Swoon!)

Finally, it was time to figure out her flaws.

I knew I wanted enemies to lovers. I also knew why Sims Chloe was mad and stressed all the time – poverty’ll do that to you!

But since I had just changed her backstory, I needed a new basis of the character. I mulled over a couple ideas, but nothing really stuck until I turned inward.

In the first draft of my planning document, Chloe’s major problem was her flakiness. She would say she would do something but fall through, causing major problems between her and Michael.

I do regret to confirm that this IS one of my big problems as a person. It scared me to write, so I knew that was the story I could tell authentically.

But I knew I had a bigger problem I could give her. (You’re welcome!)

Over time, after talking with my genius friends (shoutout to my spouse and my friends David and Matthew) we refined her character.

Chloe’s main struggle has shifted away from flakiness to struggling to express herself in a heartfelt manner, another problem I’ve been personally grappling with it. Chloe and I do care deeply about the people we love but when we go to express it, our minds go blank. Additionally, Chloe and I are both extremely one-track minded and as a result, we can get selfish at times when we’re too focused on whatever has caught our interest.

But what else?

I was NOT about to write a complete self-insert character, especially because this character falls in love with someone. So Chloe needed to be different.

Matthew workshopped with me for an hour. We decided she’s a workaholic, filling her time with her job to avoid emotional conflict. This is extremely different from me who feels her feelings deeply and easily runs to her husband for comfort. She has an awful relationship with her father, unlike me and my amazing dad. Finally, she’s a baker, an early bird, and bad at cooking. I am none of these things.

That’s all, folks!

No more spoilers. I’m thrilled about the current state of her character and I’m satisfied that she and I share flaws but she’s her own person.

I look forward to continually fleshing out her character as I continue to write. Note that, as always, this is just the state of affairs at time of writing (3k words in the first draft) so this may change by the time I finish writing.

Make sure to subscribe to keep following Chloe’s evolution!

See you soon,

-Atticus