Yes...but I believed your opinion to be rather narcissistic and snarky, so I assumed that snarkiness was an acceptable form of discourse for you. Apparently I was wrong. However, now that I know that you are allowed to be snarky to others but others are not allowed to be snarky to you, I will adjust my responses accordingly. ** **** ***. Good day
Agreed. Depending on how big of a part they are playing in the lives of the other characters or if I am ever writing about them for more than a handful of sentences I develop them quite a bit. The vast majority of the time all the information that helps me understand the character and their motivations are not things the reader needs to know so they never see it. It's tempting to tell the reader everything but they don't need to know everything. Work on a need to know basis. If the character is a fringe character that is there for a moment I don't really develop them. The reader doesn't need to know about the entire life of a character who is a stranger to the protagonist who happens to be in the same general area. Think of it this way, if you went to the grocery store and knew the life story of every single stranger you saw there it would be a massive information overload. If you're going to the grocery store to get milk and eggs you don't need to know the entire life story of every stranger there you just need to know what isles those items are on and how much cash to bring. Excellent advice. I agree completely. I like to give myself a few characteristics to get me started. I oftentimes wind up changing a lot of the details and even some of the major characteristics. Basically they are a great starting point but can be a hindrance if you are not flexible!
Yes -- not every character is major. If they're only there once or a few times to enable the MC to do something, they don't need to be developed.
I like putting them in situations that I myself have been in and writing them how it feels natural for them to respond. That way, you can see their actions from their perspective and your own and relate the two, as well as gaining a deeper understanding of the differences between them and the reasoning behind this. It has worked really well for me, especially considering my characters are insanely complex, although it does feel awkward when a character you've designed to be a dick actually comes across as better than you in, say, dumping an ex
tip: let a story simmer in your mind for a while. I do that and I've developed a lot of good characters from that. Example: a guilty prince who is a member of a race responsible for slavery, rape, and genocide. He hates everything about his father's kingdom but isn't brave enough to say anything about it. Overall... kind of a coward but i wouldn't say that describes him completely. As the story goes he ends up having to take a girl as a servant in order to protect her from his twin and father, and plans to help her escape. The point: Characters are people. You take the time to get to know them. I've been writing the above char for three years, and it took two to get him straight in my mind. I'm not saying it will take that long to get to know your char, but it might actually be a good idea to generalize their situation/persona in such a way that it is flexible enough for minor tweaks.
^ that pretty much. For me anyway, it's not so much as getting to know the character as it is actually becoming the character. If I try to view the character externally, ie through an interview, then I'm only getting the surface of his character and that probably involves more work than I would prefer. If I take on the mindset of the character, the personality comes more naturally. And it doesn't just come by asking yourself "I wonder what I would do in his shoes". It takes a lot of mental effort to become that character fully like an actor, with the motivations, emotions and gestures being clear all at once. All writers do this instinctively on some level, but really focusing on it can make it easier to know him/her by intuition.
I think I managed a break through in getting to know one of my characters yesterday. I was writing something very emotional and I had this great writing vibe going on and I managed to pull on the characters shoes and writing him never went so easy. I had this strange feeling and I actually wanted to hug him and tell him everything will be all right. I have been using the tips given here for a couple of days now and I already feel a deeper 'connection' between myself and the character. At one point I even felt a little sad that he was just a fictional character since I would love to be his friend... despite that he can be a annoying sometimes
I've got to agree with Nee. If its not significant to the story, I don't CARE about who John likes to have lunch with on a normal day. Let the story invent the person. John walks into an alley and gets threatened with a knife. John decides to fight back and gets hurt. Now we know he's stupid and maybe too macho for his own good. It's an interesting fact about John that emerges from the story while simultaneously evolving it. Now John is in the hospital, and his long time friend, who has lunch with him every day, comes to visit him, and berates him for his foolishness. Then we find out she's had a crush on John for years, as she's in tears at the hospital by the bed. John's response? He wants to find the guy who stabbed him and retrieve his money. This refines what we know a little bit about John, in terms of history and character, all in the interest of evolving the story. Again, no character sheet needed. No time spent on writing excess scenes and personally, I find those scenes boring, anyway, if we strip them out of the context of drama.
I'm opposed to character sheets, but I'm not opposed to learning (of course, creating, but it feels like learning) things about my characters that don't end up coming out in the final story. Writing some extra scenes to get to know my characters better may be valuable at best, useless at worst, but not actually harmful, in the way that I think that character sheets are harmful. When I consider my reason for this view, I conclude that it's because, to me, character sheets are prescriptive and extra scenes are descriptive. A character sheet tells me what a character is supposed to be like and supposed to do, and that limits my options because it also tends to define what he's not supposed to be like and what he's not supposed to do. A character sheet suggests a level of consistency and simplicity in human behavior that I think just doesn't exist. Let's say that I write in my character sheet that every Saturday night Joe drops by the diner, after the ten o'clock news, for a piece of pie. And I start a scene where Joe wanders into the diner and meets the new waitress who's going to be important to the plot, and I discover that Joe just wants to buy a candy bar at the register. If I've written that character sheet, I'm going to wonder why. Or, worse, I might not even let Joe buy that candy bar, because he's "supposed" to buy the pie. I might fail to realize that Joe feels that sitting down to ten o'clock pie is a bit of an old-fogeyish habit, and that he doesn't want to seem that way in front of that interesting waitress with the clever eyes. He wants to seem like a man with a busy schedule, too important to linger over pie. He wants to buy the candy bar, offer a brief witty story, and vanish into a fog of mystery--at least, that's the impression that he hopes to give. And that also solves my concern about that pie scene running on too long and being too sparse on interest. I like that better than my original plan, but if that character sheet is sitting there shouting, "Pie! Pie! Look, you _created_ me for character consistency after all!", I might be distracted from it. Sure, I wrote the sheet, so I can violate it whenever I want. But all the same, I don't want the sheet to distract me with "shoulds".
Character sheets may cause you to think in a much narrower way about your character's personality, by subconsciously stiffening this kind of spontaneous gut action/reaction cascade because you have put so much work into the character sheet that you (naturally enough) want to faithfully depict the character as you worked them out. And by the way, I find myself always wanting to include any scene that I wrote to get to know my character into the main narration of the story precisely because of this same reason.
I think character sheets have their place as guidelines: I have templates for a basic data sheet and an extensive one (the latter covers everything from the normal height/weight etc. to the lengths/girths of limbs, bodyfat percentage, childhood, preferences in food, opinions about various things etc. That is only if I feel like writing such details down, if not, I'll stick with the basic data sheet). Regardless of whether it's the basic or detailed sheet, I find writing one solidifies the character a bit more to me. Then I start to write and often the characters, sooner or later, take on a life of their own and usually reveal new things about themselves to me over the course of the story. The data sheet is just the basis to work from when you still don't have a solid grasp on your character. However, if I already feel like I know my character well, I don't bother writing even a basic data sheet unless my co-writer, KaTrian needs one so she can better remember details about my character. To me such sheets are just tools I use when needed, I don't find them limiting at all because I don't treat them like words written in stone: sometimes I give a character red hair and a snappy personality, but she ends up with green hair and a mellow personality if that's the way the character turns out. I guess this might have something to do with how I perceive my writing: it often feels like all the stories and characters already exist in some sort of weird mental ether and I'm just a filter through which the story and characters shift into our reality, on the pages. This means that whatever perceptions I have of a story or character I'm writing are never perfectly solid and I try to give the stories and characters room to develop on their own because then they feel the most natural to me instead of forcing something into a story or on a character just because I want it there (I've tried that plenty of times and it never seems to work as well).
Wow! I've never heard of anyone, even the most devoted character-sheet-maker, keeping track of bodyfat percentage and lengths/girths of limbs. Oh well. If it helps you, great. I guess you have to keep track of details like that because you work with a collaborator, and you have to do whatever you can to make sure that the two of you are thinking as one.
As long as people using character sheets understand they need to be flexible and that the sheets are only springboards, I think they're a good way to at least get started. However, something struck me while I was reading ChickenFreak's post. I should have thought of it sooner but I'll explain why a bit later here. There are two types of creativity, I think. Well, at least two. There are those who can improvise and those who must plan. The other half of my brain is a master at improv. He can come up with a full-fledged character in the blink of an eye (or at least it appears that way) and he can instantly step into their shoes and handle situations as they come up. I can't do this. I'm not a quick thinker. I'm slow and methodical. I have to write things down and plan things for months on end before I can actually write. Just sitting down and improvising a story will result in a load of vapid cr*p. I think that is really where all the contention about styles of getting to know characters is coming from. Everyone thinks their style is king over all others and for them it absolutely is. If the OP is still monitoring this, they need to figure out which type of thinker they are and go from there. There is no absolute right way of going about this and really no reason for people to be arguing over which way is best.
I'm a lazy character planner, but it's pretty necessary for me to think the character through before I start writing or else s/he will make decisions that won't make sense or act strangely. Of course real people are pretty idiosyncratic and inconsistent, but I might put some more consistency in a fictional character, perhaps to make him/her stand out from the others, so that, to a degree, this character can be described "shy", this one "cocky", and so on. We have a character sheet system for this reason. Unfortunate for him, my better half thinks things through in more detail than I, and I usually know what he's writing better than vice versa. Then he asks, "so what's your character's body fat percentage? Where does she have moles?" And I'm like *shrug* and have to come up with something. I had no idea what my MMC's weight was, it's never mentioned in the story, but I guess that just goes to show how differently the human brain works depending on the person. Some want more detail even when it's never mentioned in the novel. Hemingway's iceberg metaphor and all that...
I've never envisioned writing in collaboration with somebody else, but you make it sound like a lot of fun. And I imagine two heads can be better than one, at times! You probably both don't get 'stuck' at the same time, do you?
Very rarely. Though I'm myself currently a bit stuck. For some reason I can write dialogue, no prob, but I'm struggling to convey a character's emotions. I don't think it's due to poor planning, cos that character I know (not down to her moles though). I sometimes stop and marvel at how well the writing process actually works even though we have two heads working on one story, and how crappily I write if I try to do it on my own. Sure there are hitches, like me being a less-detailed character planner, but nothing too bad x)
I think Normal Mailer described writing as 'the spooky art' when asked how he gets the ideas for his novels and their characters. I remember a vivid scene in my head I needed to jot down quickly. I don't know where they came from but they were in my head loud and coourful. I knew what he looked like, I knew his name, that he has a partner and a child. I eventually got absorbed, not in the plot, in the characters and who they are, where they go to work, what do they look like, how old they are, how they grew up and who with, how they met, how the MC was injured, aspirations, little idiosyncrasies and habbits that cause joy or annoyance with each other at home and around others.. before I knew it I had covered both sides of two A4 pieces of paper just about three characters and some of the details I may not use and even add during writing. But it helps to make me feel like the characters are real. I know that may sound weird but I regularly do that now and it feels, by the end, that I know the characters like I do real people.
I often take my characters numbers down and call them. then maybe a nice dinner and maybe some put-put or pool and then go to the lake and see where things go from there.
First, I make a characters sheet. And you know what I fill in the sheet? NOTHING. AT. ALL. But the sheet is there, empty. It's quite an extensive sheet, though. It has name/family/outer characteristics (eyes,hair,body,skintype,scars,etc.), relationships (friends, enemies, forgotten, pretending allies, etc.), goals (current ones, finished ones, and the ones s/he pretends), skills (strenght, speed, agility, weapons, languages, (il)literacy, persuasion, animal skills, etc.), likes (+reason?)/dislikes (+reason?)/fears (+reason?)/tics. And one corner for what I think is very important for someone's character: Personal moral guidelines I get to know my characters during the writing or the story. Before writing I just decide the "general looks and attitude" of the person. But its all a bit blurry and I don't know ANY characteristic for certain. Then I write. And whenever I add one characteristic for certain (eye color, or a strenght/weakness) I add it to the character sheet. It's just to "not forget" what I wrote down. You (or at least *I*) can't search & find every single characteristic of every single character, since I don't know HOW I added it to the text. So that's why. However, I do find that I use the character sheet less than I intended them to. I tend to know at least the general looks/personality/goals/relationships and strenghts/weaknesses by heart. Only sometimes I forget small details.
I always try and work out the personality of the character before anything else. What is his/her emotions, ambitions, hobbies, likes/dislikes etc. Then I work out how they would respond to generic situations - Losing something of value to them, having an argument with a friend or relative, being in a fight. What is the characters drive/resolve? Why do they act the way they do? - Losing a parent, having a disability or illness, traumatic experience as a child or adult etc. How would they overcome obstacles? - Physical or mental attributes. Following that I develop the physical aspects of the person depending on how they think and behave. What sort of relationships would they have with their family, their friends, their lover? If the text is written in first person - what the character say about him/herself. If the text is in third person - how would the character be portrayed to other people? Usually, I will have a general plot that the character has to fit in to and so the personality/physicality of the character will be adapted to suit the plot. Not all of the characteristics of the person will be fully developed by the time I start to write the piece so that - should a new influence or event take place - the character is adaptable enough to suit the new challenge without having to force an already pre-set characteristic creating major difficulty with the plot line.
I think that this pretty much sums up my approach. Although I am just now returning to writing after a very long break, I always wrote down some basics about the character (name, age, relationship to other characters, intended role within the story) and left the rest to develop as I went. I often found that my characters would gradually take on a personality of their own, so I normally would not have to write anything else down about them. I guess this can be considered spending time with them, as some of the others have mentioned, correct? Some good points made in this thread, which will help me shake the dust off.
Before this story, I let my characters develop themselves as well, but one of the characters has gone through something very traumatic before the story starts and that experience has changed him a lot thus I really need a 'how he was before' and 'how he is now and why'. Another reason why I have to know almost everything (though I leave room for surprises) is that I am co-writing. We all have our own p.o.v characters, but she still has to know who my characters are and why they will or will not do certain things or react in certain ways.
Write out about as much of your character as possible if it's a main character Truly have him pictured what he likes he doesn't like Maybe write about him in different scenarios
This might sound rather strange but I think about what type of music they would listen to and why and this has given me some fantastic ideas for scenes and dialogue when it comes to lyrics from songs that my characters could relate to.
