Rewriting Old Characters
Okay, so a couple days ago I ran into a dilemma when I decided I wanted to start playing a character I'd been putting on the back-burner for the last few years. Her history is absolutely horrendous. I mean, it would read pretty well as a short story... if it weren't rushed so much. Because she was my first crack at playing a supernatural character, a lot of the events in her life are a little overly dramatic, and at the time, I imagined that it would be a pretty interesting genre to play, given the right kind of limitations and setting.

For me, I chose to exclude creatures other than humans (vampires, werewolves, shape-shifters, etc.) I gave this character limited psychic ability and almost no control over it. There were three main abilities I focused on: psychokinesis/telekinesis, premonitions, and the ability to sense the aura or inner being of others.

When it comes to psychokinetic/telekinetic powers, she isn't able to use it at whim. It's something that happens only during high periods of emotion. For example, when she's really pissed off and decides to take her anger out on some object, it might fly a good distance away from where it was sitting at the time or it might just suddenly break. I haven't exactly figured out what might happen when she's extremely depressed or overjoyed.

The premonitions, I figured, would be something to help move the story along and give her some special insight during a particularly tight situation for her. This is cheesy, but think of That's So Raven... except that it would be used in a much more tasteful, non-Disney format.

As for the ability to sense the aura of others, I sometimes feel like that was just thrown in there because I was having fun writing the character at the time, but the more I think about it, if I were planning to play this character in a Charmed like way in which baddies show up in each new event, it could definitely have its purposes. In the end though, it could always just be a gut feeling she gets from being connected to this psychic or spiritual energy (whatever you wanna call it) rather than an outright ability.

It seems like I have quite a bit of this thought out, but every time I stare at the profile, I think, "Wtf did I write three years ago?" I feel like when I attempt to rewrite this character that I keep moving further and further away from my original intention. The very first story I ever wrote about her was actually much different than what I have in her journal now and touched on some very taboo subjects like rape, and when I look at the two stories I have now, I feel like the first one is so much more plausible than the second.

I asked for advice from chaperoned and what chaperoned does is use a very basic profile skeleton and fill that in. My approach has always been just to open up an MS Word document and free write until I can't think of anything else, so here's my question for you guys and gals:

What do you do when attempting to rewrite a character?