Creating Characters

[Selati]

Hehe being wordy seems like a good thing to be for a writer!

Thanks for all the replies everyone, they've given me a lot to think about and some new ideas to try. I'll be sure to have some interesting characters to play with in no time!

[chrispenycate]

I was just meditating on the title of this thread.

You know, the amount of obedience I get from my characters, it's quite possible that they have created me, in order to have someone to write them, rather than continue in non-existence.
Which would make them author creating characters.

[chopper]

but what happens if they die?

[glandowski]

I write a basic out line of the story and note any key characters with a generic identification.

Then as I flesh out the story I flesh out the key characters.

By the fifth pass I have a good idea who is important and needs better detail.

Cheers

[jezelf]

For me, a character generally presents themselves as the plot or scene unfolds in my imagination. But Also it's worth working out what archetype is required and work backwards from there.

As an excerise, I open the dictionary up, and without looking, open at a random page, point at a random word. The word is a good starting point for a character trait, the page numbers can give you their age (e.g 134 could be 134, 13 or 34 or 4! - you could even use odd for Female, even for male ) and the rest can flow - race, sex, height etc can all be inspired from there - listen to your imagination that will bounce from that first word.

Do this about 3 or four times for the same character to build up their personality (do it again if there is a contradiction...unless you want your character to be a trickster, shadow or suffer from personality disorders etc)

Jot it all down in your note book with your other ideas - perhaps under a heading of it's archetype that it fits into - and then come back when your want a character, pick one that might suit your story. It can really help create fresh, non-biased characters. I sometimes find I gravitate towards similar characters - typical cliches and this take me in a new direction like a dip in cold water.

Another tool would be to use person's Enneagram type and that could shape how your character develops. You can go further and read up on physcology and mental disorders and the rest - all stuff I like to do. It can take your chracters into more depths.

Most of all this would probably not come out in your story, but just like creating what colour their eyes are or their place of orgin, if they were abandoned or loved as a child etc, it can shape your character.

hope it helps
Jez

[Mica]

I like to do the world building first. As I'm writing the history of races/groups of people ideas for stories and characters in that world usually come to me and I jot them down in a separate file. Then once I think I've done enough (or one story grabs me and won’t let me go) I go to the file and see which stories/characters still seem interesting and develop them from there.

[Keeper]

Generally it depends. If I know I want a certain character to do a certain thing (like be a king, leader, set out on a task, be a villian) it is easier since then I am just drawing up someone with an idea of how they will be already. Which, it seems that is how most of my characters start out so far. Yeah, its not a very difficult transition once you know what you want the character to do in a story, but it has worked for me.

[Lith]

All of the above. Some of them come out of nowhere, without stories attached, and only later (possibly) find a story in which to belong. Others appear as I need them, either fully-formed, or more often, half-formed, like a seed that grows and develops.

I work both top-down and bottom-up. Which can be a nightmare for consistency, when you lose track of your changes...

[ushumgal]

My characters usually come from either the plot or scene I have in mind. In general, I tend to have a very plot-driven (or plot-directed) was of writing, and I do wish I could get away from that somewhat, do more in the way of character sketches.

One of my main problems is that I usually write in my own scifi universe, which has its own languages, so I have to make up all the names. And I find I'm *terrible* at coming up with a name that really suits a character as well as the fictional language that is supposed to have produced it. I often end up just writing PN1 and PN2 and so on (PN=personal name), but that's prettly clumsy. I've been thinking I should just use normal, current names until I can replace them with something better.

[TheWeeper]

To make a charecter I just take somthing the story needs, such as a mage, give him a basic persenality, such as selfish, smart, gready, cruel, and then I give him a flaw, such as he loses stuff all the time, give him a name, for exemple Nernehar, then i use him in the plot, and find out new things about him as the plot goes on.

[Malloriel]

Being greedy, cruel, and selfish aren't flaws?

I agree that any character needs flaws to add depth. I also think that any antagonist needs virtues to keep them realistic as well.

As for naming characters, the first thing I do is think of words that define the personality: strength, wisdom, gentle, beautiful. Something that could sum up one or more of the most prominent traits. Then I'll start looking up names on baby naming sites. My personal favourite is 27,000 Baby Names, Meanings and Origins at Baby Names World because of the versatility of the search engine. Using the advanced search you can choose the gender, country/language of origin, the letters you want it to start or end with, etc. You can pick the number of countries you want to look at as well, to get a good spread. Or you can look it up by meaning. So if you want it to sound like it's from a particular kind of region, or be a particular meaning, this is one handy-dandy site to have. From there, I either use the name as is, or more likely I modify what I find into something completely unique for my world, but which still sounds comfortable to pronounce because of the similarity to names that already exist without necessarily defaulting on actual common names.

I think it's also a neat idea, if you're really world building on top of everything (and I'll now have to do as well), to develop what names would be common in your world, even region by region. The "John Smiths" and "Michael Elis"s of whatever land you're creating.

I certainly don't disagree with any of the methods above, including deciding that the story revolves around, for example, a mage. Then maybe set up a conflict for him: The head of the Mages Council is corrupt and planning to unleash a great evil over the land for reasons related to greed and personal weakness. Knowing what he's going to go up against eventually, determine basic traits, like curiosity, a sharp mind that can put together pieces of a puzzle that look unrelated, a quirky sense of humour, and for a couple of flaws he's a womanizing drunkard who has never stopped to grieve over the death of his younger brother. Then pick what magic he uses. Let's say elementals, he's a Fire mage (I'd usually go for Darkness or Water myself, but Fire's nice and easy and pulls me out of my own comfort zone). Aspects of Fire can be added to his personality now. A voletile emotional base -quick to anger, quick to cool, quick to judge-, passionate, possibly forceful, a little inconsiderate, but generally warm and friendly. Now we can pick a name. We want something that sounds unusual, but which is easy to pronounce. We don't want to make up a language for this because he's human and distant from any other unusual race, so we're going to use my previous method of naming. Let's go off of names that include "fire" somewhere in their meanings:
---
Aedus - Fire (Gaelic)
Agnimitra - Friend of the fire (Sandskrit)
Atash - Fire (Afgan)
Fintan - White-haired; white fire (Gaelic)
Lyulf - Fire wolf (English)
Resheph - Fire (Hebrew)
Tanguy - Fire warrior (Breton)
Uddhava - Sacrificial fire (Sanskrit).

As a basic list. Then you can sit back and look at the meanings. Personally, I like Sacrificial Fire, Fire Wolf, and Fire Warrior. Looking at the names themselves, I like Fintan, Lyulf, and Atash the most as they are. So, if I pick one of them, I now have an idea of what kind of flavour I can give his home land. Seeing the names there, there's very little that needs to be done to make them fit a fantasy setting, so lets go with Lyulf, not only because it sounds cool, but aspects of the wolf can now be worked into his personality. That sense of innate power, a quiet reserved confidence, a strong sense of loyalty and kinship with those closest to him, and a fierocity that well matches fire itself, but with a honed, vicious edge that may not have been there before. A righteous vengeance.

It's an English name, so surnames shouldn't be hard to fabricate for him. I definitely suggest not using actual surnames so often in fantasy because it begins (in my opinion) to eat away at that foundation of fantasy that we're building, so let's call him Lyulf Greatwater, for further character development. He's the only member of his family to use fire within a long line of mages with greatest strength in water, so notably that their surname became synonymous with their element.

So merely in deciding what he is, what he uses, basic traits and flaws, and what his name is, we have very securely developed what sort of person he is. From there you can delicately insert him in his new world and see what reactions you get by throwing situations at him, thus discovering who you have created as you navigate him from point A to point Z, your ultimate conflict and climax.

Not my usual method, in fact it's really the first time I've done that, but he gives much, much more than a basic framework or skeleton to work from, and even I find myself impressed by the depth you can gain just from those pieces of information. I'd be interested in seeing what he does and where he goes, the kinds of experiences he wracks up with quirks like womanizing and drinking and suppressed grief mixed with an unusually sharp mind and, we can surmise, an attention to detail which allows him to make connections between seemingly unrelated facts despite his vices. He is his own personal dichotomy. If anyone would like to use him, feel free. I'd love to see what you come up with. ^_^

But I've already expressed one of my own personal methods on the first page of this post, and that's really more of what I do. Little vignets of scenes that come to me, inspired by this or that - a movie, a game, a cloud, a conversation- and build from there. I like how organic it can be, how within the complexity of my stories connections crop up on their own, taking loose ends of other stories and tying them into the new ideas as if they'd always been there to begin with, or always meant to be and had just been waiting around for the true connections to pop up.

A lot of the characters came from personas created for the S.C.A (Society for Creative Anachronism, look it up. ^_^) and the stories for why one persona would know another, and then how they could fit in the world I'd already been working on. Many (many, many) others came from online role playing. For example, the Dorosai (yes, I know it's similar in appearance to Dorsai), or head of the human kingdoms, is the very first role playing character I ever created, though more like Fionna 3.2/Phae'ana 1.2 as she's undergone not only revisions, but at least one complete overhaul.

I've taken many situations I really enjoyed from role playing experiences and reworked them to remain part of the characters I'd created, but to be my own work specific to Eleasia. And in some ways, the world building itself lends itself to stories and characters. With an Age of Legends, for example, there was a huge, huge battle and bloodlines from some of the most notable warriors still floating around that play key roles in "current" events. The vague ideas of these ancient warriors became more solid of necessity to me as an author, because knowing what happened allows me to use it to colour the "present".

So, I think there are just too many ways to approach character creation. Try some things out, experiment and just see what feels right and gives you the most to work with comfortably. But most of all, have fun with it, because it's not worth the effort, if you ask me, if you can't enjoy what you're doing.

*NOTE* Any and all mistakes grammatical or otherwise are the official mistakes of this post and will remain due mostly to the laziness of the author. Thank you.

. . . The End.

[ChrisBfla]

When I wrote my first novel, I used a lot of atributs for my characters, taken from real life. These were diffferent bits and pieces of people I knew or had met over many years. For the lead female character of my book, I used everything about my wife. In my story, Marina is from Kiev and born of Russian and Ukrainian parents. She's a radio astronomer working for the Russian Space Agency on SETI projects. My wife is from a city just outside of Kiev and is Russina/Ukrainian as well so I even used her parents in parts of the book, casting her dad as the Russian Minister of Defense. This all went along with a romantic subplot. This made a lot of the book very easy to write.

You can find the characters to populate your story almost anywhere, but using people that you actually know and just exagerating certain traits seems to work. I did not however exagerate my wife's great beauty or intelligence. She's so over th top in those areas already it would have been difficult to improve upon them.

Chris

[Tobytwo]

Generally the plot outline comes before the characters, and the characters tend to be the sorts of people who fit the plot, although both affect each other. At times it's not so much the plot that dictates the characters as the need to be entertaining for the reader: my four main characters were written so that no matter who was in the room they could have an argument.

But ultimately I think you have to be able to imagine them fully. It's fine to use random determination tables or whatnot to get the basics, but then you have to connect these and fill them out into a full character, which is where it gets tricky. You don't have to know everything about the character, I think, but you do have to be able to come up with a convincing response to a question about him/her.

[Cheehwawa]

The main character of one of my projects is named Odessus. The character has had many names, the most recent was Osiris, but I figured I should think up an original name... I was reading about the Odyssey, thought about Odessa (which is a form of Odessyus, which means 'wrath') and then I got this cool idea to have 6 past incarnations of the character named after the other 7 deadly sins, tie that into the plot, etc. Im not too sure how the original idea came up.... probably after reading about Osiris vs Set from Egyptian mythology

[WafflesToo]

I've always enjoyed just creating the character's basics and let them run wild in my head for a while. Eventually they just kind of create thier own characteristics...

...beware Flandersization.