Resources for character development

I highly recommend Orson Scott Card's Characters and Viewpoint. It's an excellent book (probably the best book on writing that I've read), and he discusses a lot of important issues in building characters that are very insightful.

Not only shopping lists of details, but how the character is viewed by others; their past; their motivations. He talks about how you can choose characteristics, traits, and quirks that dovetail well with the character's role in the story, and how to portray those elements and make them significant.

Beyond that, the details you mentioned are all good directions - and any one idea can be the germ of a great character. Actively look for interesting ideas you haven't seen much, or even commonplace ideas you haven't seen much and why they might be interesting after all. For example, one author I read wrote a story about a high-school band master; I'd never read a story about someone of that profession before, and he did really neat things with it - and got a lot of compliments from band masters who were thrilled to see a great story about one of their own :)

posted almost 14 years ago

CC BY-SA 4.0

Standback‭

680 reputation 38 269 122 1

Sometimes it can be helpful to use your plot to extrapolate what the characters who are involved in it are like. Let's say you're writing a story about a long sea voyage. Right away, that tells you that the main character has some sort of reason for being on a sea voyage. And once you know what that is, you'll know a few things about who this character is. If your character is going out to explore the world, that's going to indicate certain things about his or her personality (adventurous) and possibly the resources he or she has access to (the money and supplies needed to mount such an expedition, including the ship). Then you can go a little deeper into why this character is looking to explore the world, which will suggest still more about the character. Is this a grizzled veteran sailor looking for one last chance to discover something and gain a place in history? Or perhaps a naive noble who thinks going to sea will be a fun adventure? Or maybe a sailor hoping to strike it rich and make a better life for his or her family back home? That's only a few of the possibilties, but you can see how each reason for wanting to explore at sea would suggest a different background, social status, and personality for each of these characters.

Of course, just deducing character traits from the plot can lead to boring, stereotypical characters. So once you have the basics, play around with it a bit. Ask yourself "What would happen if this person was A instead of B?" Doing that a couple of times and picking the results that lead to the most interesting character while still giving him or her a reason and capability to do what your plot requires.

As a couple of other people have already said, don't add quirks just to add quirks. You will probably want to figure out the particular ways your character show certain emotions or what he or she does when there's not much else to do. But there should be a reason that makes sense in the story for everything that happens. The fact that your character is a terrible trumpet player isn't important unless your character has a plausible reason to play the trumpet or talk about playing the trumpet during the course of the story. The character's lack of trumpet playing skills may reveal how she has never really finished anything she started before or how he had a bad relationship with his father, but you still need a logical reason for it to come up in conversation or for the character to play the trumpet, let alone bring it on a sea voyage.

posted almost 14 years ago

CC BY-SA 3.0

InkAndPixelClub‭

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I have found character sheets for online roleplayers in MMOs to be very helpful for fleshing out characters; after all, the main thing that their writing is based off of is their character and the world.

Obviously some points have been added to the character sheets to accomodate the peculiarities of the fantasy/game world, but they're easy enough to delete/change when copying the sheet over into Word/Open Office.

Forcing myself to fill these out--and fill them out extensively--has always been very helpful for me to invent a well-rounded character whom I know well.

Obviously a lot of this has to come from your own creativity, too. It wouldn't necessarily occur to me to list "narcolepsy" under random quirks without a lot of practice in thinking outside of the box.

Unfortunately, I can only post two links because of my current reputation, so I had to cherry-pick out of the many different resources for roleplayers (and therefore character-building) I found.

• A player character description template and interview for the game of Aion
  I am not recommending this necessarily because of the quality of the character described here, but because of the templates and interview, which can be borrowed for personal use and filled out for your own characters.
• A "30-Day" Questionnaire covering most aspects of a character which can be filled out in far less than 30 days.

At the end of the day, loves, hates, motivations, and a distinct voice and "feel" will make your character stand out to the reader, and I assume that's what you're going for. These are just tools to maybe help you figure that out.

posted over 10 years ago

CC BY-SA 3.0

Rinari7‭

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I wrote a short story whose two characters were a white-collar criminal being held under house arrest in rural Maine, and a guerrilla soldier who broke into her house. It became clear as I developed the story that these characters had different value systems: the soldier saw himself as a warrior with honor and pride, and the criminal saw herself as a rational businesswoman. On the one hand, I really liked the dynamic that this contrast gave to the story. On the other hand, I haven’t sold it yet. :-/

posted about 11 years ago

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Seth Gordon‭

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