To write good characters it helps to have a lot of empathy and really understand someone else. To speak for them, to think for them, and to make them work, you need to understand how someone completely different to you will behave. Role-playing, either in your head, or out loud in private can be very effective and I often use it for my script ideas, especially for dialogue. I mean, my MC is a fourteen year old runaway girl with OCD and anxiety. For a 36 year old middle-class male to make her believable it takes an incredible amount of digging into my head to feel, think, and behave like her in order to make it feel authentic. And I guess it's up to the reader to decide if that was successful.
I wish I could do that. Unfortunately 'role play' is something I can't do. In fact, it's something that will make me run a mile if anybody suggests it. Even fancy dress parties make me nervous. When I was a child and got 'shot' during one of those classic cowboy shoot-em-up games, I used to lie on the ground giggling and shouting "I'm not dead! I'm not dead." Usually until somebody informed me that the tableau would be more realistically arranged, if I didn't shut up. What I do is create POV characters who are similar to me, in temperament and outlook. Then I create the other kinds of characters who are not usually POV characters based on people I know. I dig pretty deeply into how people behave and why they do what they do, but I don't do it from a totally alien POV. Maybe I should try. Oh, god no ...I'm off ...tee hee eee...
I do listen to my characters a lot. I let them argue in my head. There are times when I buy a new top and the second time I wear it, I realise it's something my MC would wear. I've never been one for wearing dresses but over the last couple of years, I've lost weight and now have a total of four. I also write under a pseudonym so I often find myself asking who am I today? Elaine Chissick the author or ....... the real life person. Obviously it depends what I'm doing or where I'm going that particular day but I do really enjoy being two people. I guess it helps that I'm a Gemini ... Which reminds me, I really must send that message about firearms research ...
They were completely unrelated or maybe not i wasn't in a normal hospital, I spent 18 months there for a suicide attempt but I am a lot better now.
Honestly I'd say that if you have to spend all day as your character just to know them you are very bad at making characters. I say this for two reasons, One: It's taken me months of writing to understand some of my characters, and they are constantly evolving. A night of role playing isn't going to help that at all. If you can figure your characters out completely in one night they are cardboard cutouts. Two: Making a backstory, graph and carts has fuck nothing to do with character creation. Your characters gain or loose depth only by the way you write them. Cosplay is meaningless here. It's only in the events of your story that any of theses details matter. I don't know Jack Asher's eye color. It's never come up. But I can tell you everything you'd ever want to know about how he thinks.
Some people need to map out a character to understand how he/she thinks. back-story is critical because our past always reflects our future. Every single person on earth. We do not exist in a vacuum and neither do characters. I don't do back-stories myself, but many do. It forms a baseline for behavior that can be referenced to make sure the writer stays on track. There is no hard and fast rule, and some people who use methods you don't like can create amazingly deep characters.
That's the way i look at it, every single writer is different and so is every book and there is no right or wrong way to do things, if there was a road map to writing we would all be on the new york times list
I never said it was a night or even two its as long as it takes me to understand them better, and it just helps me all i wanted was input if anyone else did it and their own results.
Some actors often get 'in the zone' and stay in character. I've always felt that writing is a lot like acting. You embody a character (and several others) and give them shape.
I've never hitched to a hotel to embody a character (though if I had the resources, I definitely would!) but I act out my characters all the time. Sometimes I pretend I am talking to them when I walk to my classes, or am just bored sitting around campus. Shalom is one of my best buddies in this regard, we often walk to class together and he helps me sort out my head. When I was in middle school, people planted rumors that I was nuts or talked to demons because I would talk to myself (or my characters) during recess instead of playing with the kids. Even when I'm writing my story, I might suddenly drop it and step aside to enact the scene, feel myself become the MC or whoever else--especially in emotional scenes, like I wrote a rape scene once and as creepy as that sounds, I enacted it a few times (no props, just my own physical and mental presence) to get a feel of what the MC was going through, her thoughts, feelings and physical reaction. To me it's about changing my persona from plain old 21-year-old South Asian chick to a 20-year-old Spaniard pimp or a 45-year-old matriarchal terrorist. They don't have their own bodies, so I could do them the favor at least. XD Some of my most interesting characters are usually at arm's length, and when I need help, I always ask their opinion. (Yes, even the terrorist. But don't worry, she turns into a good person later on.)
