Yep, I've been wanting to do this days ago so you describe your character (alive or dead). You can do multiple characters but you need to do something like this: Full name: James Cold Age: 23 Gender: Male Attitude: Rude and cold (like his last name) Occupation: History Teacher Backstory: His family died because of a poison in their food--except for James since he was in school. He spent his years living with his grandparents. He searched for years finding the one who poisoned his family but failed. And you can add more details
I can't really define my characters by a list of attributes. That's not how I know them. They differentiate themselves in how they react to certain situations, how they interact with each other, where they fall on certain issues. In other words character traits, that show themselves in action and interaction, not a list of physical characteristics. And as for traits like rude or warm, this is complex. A character might be warm and friendly much of the time but get mean in some situations. This comes down to the complexity of the character. I don't pre-determine things like this, I could never create a character that lives and breathes that way. Where did I see this recently, was it here on the board? Somebody had asked Leonard Nimoy how he came up with the personality traits for Mister Spock. His answer was he could never have done that—if he tried it would be a totally fake character. He simply played the part and let the traits emerge naturally in scenes, and gradually he came to know and understand the character. I'll bet he also couldn't answer certain questions about the character unless he was in a scene and let the character emerge naturally and make decisions. They need to be able to surprise us or they're not fully fleshed out enough to carry a story. And ironically, Spock is known for being almost robotic, though he was half human. And that's really where the appeal always was. he'd pretend to be totally logical, a full Vulcan, but behind that one raised eyebrow he had a very human heart that he tried to hide, that drove his actions. It was that push-pull between his trying to hide his humanness and it actually secretly driving his decisions where the drama existed.
Full name: Emba (not sure yet on a surname) Age: 19 Gender: Female Attitude: Privileged, loves life, deep love and affection of friends and family, ambitious. Occupation: Trader, socialite, heir apparent to her father's very successful trading company Backstory: Raised in comfort and with high expectations, she is rooted in their love and affection and takes great pride in her families connections. So sad she is going to have all that stripped away...
Name: Gabriel Weatherstone Age: 296 Artificial age: 21 Gender: AIS Male Personality: Introvert, curious, artistic, creative Occupation: Table-waiter, freelance IT Hobbies: Engineering, programming/digital design/interactive simulations, theoretical physics, ultracryptozoology, investigation, ballet, dark fashion, simulation immersion, theology, history, robotics, live-streaming with friends Backstory: Born as a rare form of nyctomorphic vampire, much of his existence is penned in a large collection of journals, and documented in old paper clippings and sensitive, classified files.
Name: Jeremy Age: However old the time period between the Middle Ages and the end of humanity is (Apparent age: mid-twenties) Gender: Male Personality: dark humor but very professional Occupation: Leads the recently deceased to their to-be-chosen afterlife, be it Christian Heaven, Norse Valhalla, the Egyptian underworld, etc. Backstory: Created sometime around the start of the Black Death plague. He was only human for a short time (if at all). In the afterlife, souls/spirits have different appearances based on their personality, but they can change it if they want to. One of them changes his to that of a (not necessarily accurate) plague doctor. This spirit guides others to the afterlife, but instead of taking Jeremy to his, takes him as an apprentice as well as adopting him. And Jeremy, looking up to the man who took him in, adopts the same appearance. He soon takes on the full-time job of leading souls to the afterlife. Later story: It is known that eventually, a soul who was human in life will come to this "in-between" world where Jeremy and his mentor, plus many other souls, reside. This particular soul will go on to be a new god/goddess and ruler of this "afterlife between afterlives." A soul, from sometime before the fall of humanity, comes to the two for guidance. Jeremy's mentor has a strange feeling about her. Could she be the queen they had been waiting for? Is Jeremy the one who, out of all souls of all time, has the privilege to guide her? (Spoiler alert: yes.) (Please excuse my medieval obsessions)
My fictional character will be an elderly man of 50-60 years old who will live in Iceland in a lonely house, around which there will be mountains, the sea and very beautiful views. In this environment, this man will delve into his thoughts, memories and regret some moments of his life. I recently, together with the Edubirdie company, wrote a small study about the psychotype of this fictional character and realized that in the future from this I could create a very interesting book that would be interesting to read.
If anyone sees this elsewhere on the forum (paid essay service) please report it to your friendly neighborhood mod team. Thank you.
My character is a young adult Korean. She's something of a slacker and is really only good at playing violin, so she lives in continual jealousy of her three siblings, all incredibly successful in different fields. She's the youngest, sort of leftover child, and since all their other kids ended up being successful without much effort, her parents didn't push her as much as she needed as a kid.
I just saw the message by the banned person and WHO IN THE WORLD MAKES A SMALL STUDY ABOUT THE PSYCHOTYPE (THE PSYCHO WORD ISN'T A WORD?) OF A CHARACTER??
Every character is a combination of myself and at least two other people. They're usually dislikable.
People are extremely complex. Since studying psychology for quite a few years I have a much better handle on some of them, and if I'd learn about more complexes and neuroses and personality disorders etc I'm sure I could understand more people better. The single thing that helped me understand personalities better than anything else was the Enneagram. But still, people are complex. So much so that you can't get all the depth across in a story, even the length of War and Peace. And when you think you understand somebody they'll suddenly surprise you.
I agree. But I would add that I don't try and capture the totality of anyone's depth when I'm listing their character traits. Sorta like the blurb on the back of a book isn't there to convey everything that might have value in the story. It just offers an impression. And that helps. But whatever works for your process.
There are factors over and above personality and psychology that need to be determined early on, like the big character flaw that needs to be overcome, and figuring out how the protag and the antag will butt heads constantly. And of course, once the story starts to take off the characters often pop into 3 dimensional reality, take on a life of their own that isn't the same as what you originally came up with. I guess that can happen even if you start off with a character sheet.
I don't know, maybe the kinds of people that have the need for that service. "I could create a very interesting book that would be interesting to read." Is it possible to create an uninteresting book that is interesting to read? Maybe the ban isn't permanent and they'll learn something from this forum.
Hmm. I'm not sure how something like a character flaw would always (if ever) be over and above personality and psychology. Even the conflict between the protagonist & antagonist might be influenced by those.
What I'm saying is you need to know the flaw and how the MC and the antagonist conflict with each other in order to write the plot. Those can be figured up on paper. But when it comes to the personalities, I build them like I said above. I suppose you can start by just creating characters, but then how do you know they're the right characters to generate a powerful enough conflict? Edit—that said, I've never actually written a story according to any kind of structure, this is stuff I'm studying now. I shouldn't be saying anything about specifics of 'how I do it'. I mean yeah, I do know how I create characters, but not how I link them into a plot structure. And who knows—learning structure might change the way I create characters.
Most (possibly all) fully-realized characters have a story worth telling in my opinion. So that's one way to get moving. Another way is to start with your premise and then dream up the main characters with your conflict in mind. And with either of those, character notes/sheets can be helpful, for some writers at least. Me included.
I already said I have no problem with starting from a character sheet, but it's when the characters come alive that they become fully realized. For Tarantino apparently that's halfway through the script, I try to get it to happen before that. But I do think they need to reach that stage of coming to a life of their own, where they're no longer quite the characters you thought of in the beginning. At that early stage there's no way they can already have enough depth and subtlety. I also suspect a lot of people's characters come alive without their realizing it.
This is actually a really hard question for me to answer because I don't do character sheets, I haven't even given my character a last name yet. I just discovery write and fill in the blanks later. First name: Sandy Age: 16 (at start of the novel) 30 (later on) Gender: female Attitude: varies. Some of her worst traits prove to be useful. She's a totally different person as an adult. Occupation: Assassin Backstory: no idea, accept for what I've written and it's too much to write here and I can't remember all of it Goal: Not sure at the moment Motivation: Guilt See I just write with no idea what I'm doing or where any of it will end.
Following up on this, it's the same with the story idea itself. You start with bare ideas, scribble them down in early form, and the ideas flesh out and grow as you work on it. So there comes a point where the story itself suddenly takes on its own life, just as characters do from the early bare-bones note stage. You can't really know in the very beginning the full complexity and subtlety of the entire story, or of the characters (since they're an integral part oft he overall story). They both grow as you develop them and as you write. So I see those early notes and character sheets etc as a basic stage in their development, subject to change as things move forward.
My character is a 25-year-old guy who very abruptly entered adulthood and took on a lot of obligations to his parents, girlfriend and other close people. He is not quite ready for adulthood, he fights and loses in many life battles. But his writing activity saves him.
