Posts tagged character-development
I have been creating a story in my mind from early childhood. Now, I am very talented in writing, so I decided to give it a try one day. It was awesome! The book I imagine in my head was being writ...
I have struggled with mental illness for my entire life. Writing has been an extremely helpful and important mode of self-expression for me, since I was little. But recently, I feel like my writi...
I want to add a perverted character to my story (don't ask why), a bit like Master Roshi from Dragon Ball or Minoru Mineta from My Hero Academia. However, I want to make them more sympathetic and g...
Ok, so I currently have a visual novel (For those who do not know, it's a video game that's almost all story. The character may have a few choices in the matter, but most of it is about watching th...
So, my dilemma is as follows. I have a romance project with the MC trying to choose between two women who he cares for very much. Each has broken his heart, but are willing to make amends and provi...
How to make a cool character who is really unmanly? The guy is bad at leadership, lacks endurance and strength while also being kind of a coward and having quite feminine facial features.
One of the characters in my current piece is autistic. I'm on the spectrum myself, so I have some idea of what this is like, but I'm starting to think that I might be basing her a bit too much on m...
I'm looking for ways to build early reader investment in an unlikable character who "learns better," but not until fairly late in the book. In particular, I'm writing a first-person middle-grade n...
I'm attempting to write a novel, an historical fiction with a small fantasy component (time travel through a portal). The travelers (main characters) are a young couple from the late 23rd Century ...
There is plenty of information on how to draft characters for a single story, or characters that follow an important arc throughout a (small) number of stories. Are there any techniques for design...
So I'm building a character who works in a particular field of science and I found an e-mail for a scientist on the internet and emailed him. I described how I'm writing a sci-fi story and gave him...
I am developing a college-age female character and think that there may be a contradiction. This is an important secondary character, a good-natured girl, who is unfortunately quite promiscuous. T...
In my novel, my protagonist joins a team with four other characters to go on a quest. Each character in the team is supposed to contribute to the journey in someway and all are mentioned in a proph...
I know there are a lot of variance here, but are there any personalities/dynamics that a superhero team needs in order to work? Any advice will be greatly appreciated.
Deliberate Values Dissonance is when the morals of a character or culture in-story (whether historical or fictional) that modern people don't agree with are presented in-universe. Not because the a...
The hero in my story succeeds in destroying the villain, but not without paying a hefty prize. Not only will he die, he will stop existing and can't be brought back, at all. It's like he never exis...
A while ago, I asked if there any possible way for my series to avoid causing Darkness Induced Audience Apathy. A well thought-out response stated that unless I give my readers a reason to care abo...
Note: I am not sure of which site this question belongs to: Writing SE or Literature SE. If this question is unfit for this site, I will happily migrate it there. So I am writing about the protago...
I hope this question is not mainly opinion based, I'm really just looking for a writer's handbook/source/acclaimed author saying this is either good, okay or bad. I think it might not be so good, w...
I started a book and although I wanted it to be dark, will the readers find it too dark if the characters almost never win? Or are a lot of readers into that? In my book the two main characters' wh...
I'm midway through a Masters in Creative Writing. My tutor recently told me (something like): each character deserves a chance to be liked by the reader. I didn't want people to like the particula...
I'm writing a novel about an obsessive character who is bothering the people around him but just will not or cannot accept that a change must come. When is the most effective time (or if not - the...
There just isn't information about this on the internet (at least that I could find), so I'm here. A few specific questions: how many team members should there be? Should they all be main characte...
Is it okay to have two characters who had an argument to patch things up offscreen, or do readers explicitly need to see how they made up? None of the two characters in question are the protagonis...
I'm planning out an idea for a short story. In the story, slavery didn't abruptly end but instead continued to modern day and beyond. The structure of the story will be similar to The Last Question...
I am writing a side story called, The Afterglow of Jovian, which mainly takes place sometime during the final stages of the main story. Here's a brief gist of the main story to give some context, ...
For those of you who are unfamiliar with TV Tropes lingo, a Complete Monster is the worst kind of villain imaginable: one that is evil to the core and has little to no redeeming traits whatsoever. ...
In my story, one of the main characters finds out that a loved one (parent, lover, friend, doesn't matter) died. Worse still: they find out about it when they find the severed head of that person. ...
So when designing characters an important part of them is flaws and how they overcome them or rise above them. And so I wanted to make a character(one of the main characters, either supporting the ...
I wonder if when talking about characters (in a book with a third perspective narrator) one can list their personality traits. I realize how that might be taking something away from the story, as I...
Inserting a Fish out of water character could be good way to introduce the reader to the world and also great for comic relief, but there were cases in books I've read when the character's naivete ...
In my visual novel (an interactive, narrative-based video-game), I have a detective character who decides whether he believes interviewees controlled by the player. The detective doesn't explain ...
My story begins with a woman minding her own business and is forced to fight for her life; against a grotesque (but unseen) creature. The creature is too strong for her, she isn’t strong enough to ...
The main character of my novel (third person limited) is an outlaw, on the run from government agents and living from day to day trying to survive. In the first quarter of the story, she doesn't r...
I want to try writing a character that is able to seemingly be one step ahead of their opposition, and is able to turn all outcomes into an advantage, no matter if it seems disadvantageous, but has...
I am a little puzzled. I want to set my story in a real era that happened; like say, the American civil wars during Lincoln's time, and involve the then prominent figures like Lincoln and McClellan...
When writing a story, how do you find a good balance between the significance of different elements, such as plot, themes, and bold settings and characters, and the character arcs? In my case I ha...
Hollywood movies are a good example of this, but also many books feature the rule. When the plot revolves around life and death situations, the first to die are the characters with least developme...
In my screenplay, I feature a CEO of an advertising agency who is "pot shaped," shy, tongue-tied and a few other characteristics that make you wonder how he ever became an advertising executive, ne...
This may seem like a duplicate of Changing the way one addresses a character in a dialogue to create variation, but it the answers there did not apply. My question is: When writing in the first pe...
When striving for gender balance in a play: What is more important, balance among the characters or among the actors? (Given that all characters are written as individuals, and not as stereotypes.)...
Sexuality is a large part of who we are as persons and it influences many decisions we make. Sadly, I don't know how to make a romance subplot believable. Are there any good guidelines to creatin...
In the Harry Potter series, Dumbledore seems to represent ultimate wisdom and authority. Harry (and the readers with him) hold him in awe; many times throughout the series Harry willingly accepts a...
I'm in the process of defining the characters for a novel. It is a crime fiction, with a really strong focus on the characters. I hope to construct really rich, complex and clearly defined characte...
I have been doing some work on character development for my novel. I found that though I can write pages about the main character, other characters, who have an important role and will be there for...
When creating a character, what red flags would show me that I'm creating an unbelievable or unsympathetic character? I know that to be believable and sympathetic a character must not lean too muc...
Before anything, please pardon any grammar (or other kinds of language) mistakes I might make, for English is not my mother language. I'm making a fictional world, medieval-like with a wide variet...
I've long known what the purpose of inner conflict is. Indeed, it was one of the simplest concepts for me to grasp when I was learning about it. Now I'm not so sure. I seem to have developed a du...
I'm a plotter. I develop and plan my novels and characters well before I write them. When it comes to character development, I make sure that my characters (or at least the central ones) are people...
The terms are bandied around quite often to describe fictional characters, generally in order to help describe how developed a character is in terms of personality and backstory. However, are ther...
