The Sun Sign and Character Development

In astrology, the sun sign represents our wants. It's our character, what we strive to be. Through our sun sign, we seek to distinguish ourselves in some way and carve out a unique identity. If the moon represents our relationship to the maternal figure, then the sun represents how we separate from that figure and leave our mark upon the world. The obvious literary implication, of course, is that the sun sign you choose for your protagonist will be a driving force in his or her efforts to enact change.

However, it would be a mistake to assume that it's only the sun sign that matters. Of course, it helps to know that an Aries will be impulsive and headstrong or a Pisces sensitive and impressionable, but it's really the house that's going to tell you how those identity needs manifest. In addition to the signs, an astrological chart is divided up into twelve houses with various attributes. The rising sign, determined by your time of birth, sets the stage for the whole chart, dictating which planets fall in which houses. For example, in The Girl With the Collywobbles, Aletheia has a first house sun*. This makes her individualistic, as well as giving her a magnetic quality that attracts the attention of others, but can also bring with it a feeling of self-consciousness, as if always being watched. (Something we'll see even more of in the forthcoming sequel, The Child of Aokigahara.) For her, nothing short of absolute individuality will give her a sense of identity.

There are a number of ways in which the sun's driving need for a self can manifest based on what house it's in. For example, a sixth house sun will produce someone whose sense of identity comes through their day-to-day work life. A ninth house sun will give the person an orientation towards philosophy, alternative religions and travel whereas an eleventh house sun produces someone who gets their sense of identity through groups, teams and ideologies.

If you want to get really creative with this, you can make the driving need something that's unrealized as a source of inner conflict. A restraining element elsewhere in the chart could make that natural area of expression harder to realize and therefore could be a hang-up for them. Imagine, for example, someone who has their sun in the tenth house, ruling careers, but who has a lot of planets in more fluidic, adaptable signs. You'll have someone whose sense of identity comes through a career but is held back by their tendency to be changeable and unfocused. The need to have an identity through their career will be at odds with their tendency to get distracted or explore options. The complexity of the chart provides a lot of options for brainstorming your characters' motivations.

Next up: the influence of the moon



*However, this doesn't mean she is an Aries rising. The planets fall in houses depending on the specific degree of a given planet, house, etcetera. In Aletheia's case, she's a Pisces rising with a first house Aries sun.