Posts tagged character-development
What are the best ways you find to get out of your own habitual thought patterns, personality, dispositions, and culture when writing characters? For example, we are all familiar with the Myers-B...
Do you add pauses? Do you add interjection? Which ones? Do you misspell certain words? What are some of the tricks writers use? I don't want to say it in the descriptive passage. I want people to f...
Basically, all I want to know is how I can get my readers to root for a pairing where the difference in ages is about 15 years. I don't want them to spend the entirety of my novel pondering over th...
What are the properties a generic main character from a character-driven/psychological novel should have? E.g. relations, motives, personality, knowledge.
Not sure if this is a worldbuilding or writing question, but here it goes. In this setting, gods of humanity are beings of absolute order that exist in another plane of existence. They are consta...
(Question about my hacker (hacking??) novel.) Just an FYI, I am a woman. Edward is a cyber spy and works with an organization named Vox Populi to curate and release all data online, especially t...
There has been a story in me for quite a while. It is of two girls, set in a feudal/medieval era. They met as children. One is a antisocial bookworm, highly opinionated with a quiet steely composu...
I have a character Joe who leads the task force hunting my MC. His reputation is known to the MC and he is well aware of how effective he is. Joe is also a good friend of another character, Fred, a...
My MC is a woman who is shy, introverted, has a strong sense of right and wrong but also a doormat personality - basically, even if she sees a wrong done she would rather stay unhappy than speak up...
In Robert McKee's book STORY, he says that a whole life story of a character must become a story well-told. So, it seems that the concept of "story told" is a representation of a "life story" tha...
A CEO moves next door to a 3rd year college student who babysits and tutors for a rich family to keep the rent paid in her expensive apartment. It seems strange for a CEO, who probably has a ton of...
My protagonist is an immortal person that’s powerful enough to end all with but a thought. She has amnesia due to overusing her power when she recreated the world. The amnesia part is very importa...
My good guys murder people. They slowly carve runes onto them to help defeat the bad guys. Sure they try to use "society's worst" people for the rituals, but realistically that doesn't always happe...
I have been working on a post-apocalyptic novel for about a year. My female narrator/protagonist, named Eris, was isolated for almost all of her life until meeting a rogue group of survivors and h...
I have a character, a secondary antagonist who is following his sense of duty and pursuing a former asset. Said asset is injured, tired and cornered, seriously considering making a stand and going...
I recently re-watched the Overwatch animated short "Honor and Glory". You can tell the writers were proud of the line "Live with Honor, Die with Glory", as the characters say it a fair few times fo...
It is very important that my protagonist is mute. A lot of this character's motivations are informed by - though not entirely focused on - him having suffered laryngeal cancer and recovered due to ...
So far, I've been learning rules and guidelines for plotting a good story from John Truby's excellent "The Anatomy of Story". Truby structures plot using 22 steps (a summary here). Among them, th...
When writing dialogue all the characters sound the same. I'm not sure I even know what giving a character a voice means, but my dialogue sucks so any advice will be greatly appreciated.
I'm currently working on a team based story with a lot of characters and am looking for ways to really make their personalities stand out from one another. When I'm writing out their character pro...
Now, to clarify ahead of time; I'm quite aware that compelling doesn't necessary equal sympathetic and vice versa. That being said, here is the dilemma. There's a character that I intend to write ...
I'm writing a novel which has alternating point of views; odd chapters are from an angsty, neglected twelve/thirteen-year-old girl who's struggling with belongingness, puberty, and parental confusi...
Would it be boring/unrealistic/silly/cliché if most characters only had this main motivation for most of a story: saving humanity/their country/their familly/themselves. The setting is medieval fa...
After feedback on character design for my visual novel, my grizzled Noir Detective is drifting into an Old Jazz Musician. There's a reason I post the artwork: what has gone unmentioned in this fe...
I'm trying to write a story of transformation, in which an extremely introverted and non-confrontational person goes through a traumatic experience, and in the finale takes a stand in defense of th...
I read that it’s approved of to have the protagonist to have deep relationships which I mean as friend-related bonds between people - because it makes the character stand out I’m asking this based...
WARNING: MULTIPLE TV TROPES LINKS In my three-part series, The Ragnarǫk Cycle I plan having my protagonist and deuteragonist to undergo a character arc. The protagonist, Joseph Norton to put it l...
A character in my story is supposed to be falling apart, for many reasons: He's 16 and is killing people, in a gladiatorial setting, of a similar age. He already died (possibly a few times), but ...
We all know the spiel: We have an insufferable jerk who is a jerk/annoyance for 95% of his "screen time". In the remaining 5%, he sacrifices himself to save everyone else. The fans dance around a...
Not unsimilar to myself, my protagonist potentially has too many goals. He's isn't a likeable character (which is how I intended him) so to keep reader interest, I would like them to become invest...
I have this young character who grows up to be very strong and powerful but while he was young he was still discovering how strong he was. This incident happened to a friend he's protective of. W...
I am writing a short Sci-Fi story centered entirely on the man vs. beast narrative where the protagonist attempts to escape an unstoppable, bloodthirsty creature for roughly 15 pages. From the firs...
I'm currently struggling to write the first portion of my science fiction story that involves two characters traveling, and I was wondering if you guys had any writing resources to recommend. My go...
My triller has an Antagonist who is classified as a sociopath and narcissist. He becomes infatuated with my MC who is an Ex-Army sergeant making a living in close protection services. He sees that ...
One of my characters, Mallory is a 37-year old mother who is willingly strict with her son, as repulsive as that sounds it turns out she is remorseful over her parenting decisions and her son is de...
I said in a previous question that my protagonist "is a very shitty person that makes bad decisions for the wrong reasons". My antagonist, however, is a good person trying to do what they think is ...
My project has an environmental theme. My characters eat meals, and because of the setting, this includes meat and eggs. Some environmentally - friendly friends find those scenes very distasteful...
Recently, I am trying to write my own novel, but I came across a problem that is hindering my progress greatly. I can't get into the mind of the protagonist even though I planned her character befo...
I've written myself into a sci-fi cliche which I have never seen done well: two characters meet in virtual reality. The gist of my scene is one character has been in a pseudocoma, more aware of he...
I have three protagonists working towards the same goal but with different motives. They are co-protagonists each with their own character arc and resolution. Circumstances bring them together but ...
I've read that leaving your character alone for too long can spell death for your novel. That you should put them out there in the world so they can interact with other characters. That you shouldn...
Two characters of opposite sex meet in a blank room (nothing remarkable about the setting) for the first time and the reader isn't familiar with either of them. Since genre would sway the answer t...
I have this girl in my story, who is around 12 years old, who is the main character of the story, or one of the main characters. She is captured by the bad guys very often, and I fear this might ge...
I have created a character who has survived through a massively traumatic event which, for him, lasted about ten years. He had a major hand in this event, though he was forced to do it. (Literally....
If you were to write a story about a kid in high school who has a lot of psychopath/sociopath tendencies and doesn't feel guilt from that. How would you make him unlikeable, then likeable and how w...
I am trying to show the confusion my character feels (first person narrative) but am not sure what techniques to use. I have tried to achieve this using questions that arose through my character's ...
TL;DR How should I (if at all) develop the personality, character trait, character development and motivation of a character in a core trio whose role in the story is (thus far) only to be a mech...
The Hero's journey is very individualistic. I want to know how writers build the book's structure for multiple characters. Do they make one for each character of for a whole? If it is for a whole, ...
If let's say one wants to portray a villain in a novel that suffers from insanity/psychosis as he has literally lost his grip on reality and is kind of living in his own world, what are the things ...
Normally this sort of thing is easier than actually writing the piece for me but this time I can't get anywhere with the overall structure of the story: I want a character to win a great victory, ...
