It's a well-known fact among writers that there will always be a point, in any story, where the characters come to life, where you no longer have to think about what they say or do, where they just do it. I have a couple of questions about this.

1. When did this point come along for Bartimaeus, Nathaniel, and Kitty?

2. Were there any characters that this point came along at about the same time as others?

3. Were you expecting it when this point actually did come about?

Hello Doug; these are interesting questions. You're right that key characters like B, N and K develop to the point where you can put them in almost any situation and you have a pretty good idea about how they'll react. I think Bartimaeus became fully formed immediately - from the second page of chapter 1 his voice and personality had arrived and I found it easy to 'be' him. Nat and Kitty took a bit longer because for both I had to reconstruct their lives, i.e. how they had come to be who they are. Until I had done their back stories (I wrote Kitty's while I was writing Amulet; originally it was going to be in that book), I couldn't quite see them as three-dimensional characters. So in practise it took 2-3 chapters each for them.

I don't quite understand the second question. Sometimes it helps with secondary characters to orchestrate a 'big' scene where you can see lots of (say) magicians all at once, and can sketch out their individual characters more or less at the same time. You can quite quickly build up a blurry sense of who these individuals all are. But usually, if you want to really bring them to life, you have to spend time on them separately, and that means that they spring into life at different moments.

You can't ever really predict when these moments will happen. Suddenly you look back on a scene you've written and to your amazement it all sort of springs into life - that's when you know that the characters have achieved the next level of reality.

Thanks for the mesage.

Jonathan