Fi Phillips

I've been incredibly lucky to have had a life filled with 'characters' - colourful, and thought provoking - which has provided me with a ready pool of cast members for my plays and stories. I still do so I'm always drawn to writing advice on creating characters such as this article from This Craft Called Writing - Everything You Want To Know About Creating Interesting Characters .

Many of the books I've read over the years, in fact the ones I've enjoyed the most, have been fantastical. They have been peopled by cyborgs fighting for their freedom, time travellers and fairy folk. Their characters have journeyed between dimensions, fought monsters and defeated aliens. Some have been fantasy stories and others have been science fiction (my preferred genres). On occasion, I've dipped into horror novels and quirky contemporary fiction. What all of these stories have done well is to create worlds where the fantastical elements do not detract from convincing me that these characters are authentic, feeling, living beings. In the novel I'm writing, magical powers are an accepted part of society and yet Steve Haven still finds himself shocked by what he finds - a man who can travel miles by using a door, any door, to transport himself to a separate building, a woman with magical healing powers and children who can create light orbs. What earns his accep...

When I began writing murder mystery plays, I had the massive advantage of writing for a cast of actors whom I had worked with for several years. I knew their voice patterns, what they looked like and just as importantly, what they were capable of portraying on stage. For me, that was an incredible luxury. When it came to my novel, I knew that I would find it easier to write if I had an idea of what my characters looked like, what they sounded like, how they moved and so on. I'm a visual person - that is my main way of perceiving the world - and as such I 'see' my stories, either as plays on a stage or as films on a big screen. I decided that alongside my storyline, character list and chapter plan, I would also put together a cast. Each character in my novel is based loosely around the thought of a particular actor playing the role of Hartley or Isabelle or some other person from my created world. Note I don't say the characters are based 'on' those actors. Th...