Developing Characters

Rather then developing a treatment first, I've decided to figure out who my characters are and complete their character bios first. So who are my characters? Well, I don't quite know, and like Frankenstein, it's still a work in progress.

Since my story deals a lot with a character's emerging past and making the best of a bad situation, I've found that doing the character bios first would allow me to write a more effective treatment later. I want my character(s) to revisit their past in an interesting way, and I want their decisions to be directly branched off of that. Where they go and how they behave will all be connected to their own personal biographies.

Developing quirks, tone of voice and other notable aspects of a character, I feel, will emerge as I begin to write. I know that I have a foggy idea of how I'd like my characters to behave and to give them each a concrete personality so early in my story's development, will only weigh down their possibilities later. That being said, I've decided to hold off on the specifics for now. I also believe that making a girl sound like a real girl will be one of my biggest challenges. I think I know how they act, but let's face it, I only think that I'm right. Left and right they tell me so, it happens all the time.