1. Stanley Hu

    Stanley Hu New Member

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    How to keep it going?

    Discussion in 'Character Development' started by Stanley Hu, Jul 3, 2014.

    I've started on working a backstory for a character. I'm not quite sure how to advance the character.


    Twenty-six years ago, on the eve of Christmas Day, the world lost Hiroshi Sasaki just outside the walls of Mukaihara. The car crash didn’t kill him.

    A lacerated brachial artery let Hiroshi bleed to death – yet where was the medical support?

    Hiroshi was my father. 1919.

    The inadequacies of the Japanese medical system brought about a sudden realisation that this country needed helping hands. I made the decision to enter the field of medicine from an early age, determined that innocent lives would no longer be fruitlessly lost

    Dr Terufumi Sasaki is my name. I am a surgeon at the Red Cross Hospital in Hiroshima, the city’s largest hospital that boasts a large menagerie of facilities and faculties.
     
  2. Bryan Romer

    Bryan Romer Contributor Contributor

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    Shouldn't the events of your story be what advances your character?
     
    peachalulu likes this.
  3. Commandante Lemming

    Commandante Lemming Contributor Contributor

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    Well the character could also be what drives the events. Your Dr. Sasaki sounds like an interesting guy who's driven forward by the pain of loss and, weird mixed feelings toward the medical community, and wants to be able to save people from his father's fate (which he won't always be able to do and that will frustrate him).

    Your setting (if I'm reading it right) seems to be set up to have this man caught up in the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, so if that's the case then you have a really tragic story about him trying to take care of all the radiation victims - which of course is going to really mess him up psychologically later in his life.

    Taking out the nukes aspect - He could become depressed because he re-lives his father's death and feels helpless all the time. He could go the opposite route and try to save people in non-medical fashions - which could make him either an investigator in a mystery series, or a vigilante serial killer going after people who hurt other people. And putting the nuclear aspect back into ANY of those options could be fun (vendetta against Americans, anti-nuke terrorism, or he could give up and wind up homeless and be found wandering the streets in the 1960s)

    So there's a lot of option - you can probably come up with a lot more if you just dig a little deeper into the "why" of what you've already written.
     
  4. Stanley Hu

    Stanley Hu New Member

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    Thank you all. I am in the stage where I am just composing a short backstory on his character and how it led up to his current position.
     
  5. Mike Kobernus

    Mike Kobernus Senior Member

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    I don't really understand the question.
     
  6. Tesoro

    Tesoro Contributor Contributor

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    Do you have the actual story planned out, or just the background? I'm not sure I understand the question either, to be honest.
     

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