Favorite ways of developing character?

This is a really good idea to have separate notebooks. I have multiple notepads with scribbles and ideas about the story, characters, situations all in one. Think it's time for me to get another notebook!

 

At night, I run character and plot scenarios through my head. This helps clear my head as I prepare for sleep. I often work through logic problems in this manner.

 

Generally when I develop characters, I have planned the Arcs of the plot with the huge moments and some situation and obstacles I know I have to solve. It gives me the basis to know what skills need to be possessed by the different characters.

Then I usually take characters from visual medium, or ones for whom I have a good established (visual) image. That gives me an appearance to work on and link their traits together. Taken characters do tend to get entirely rebuild from the ground up. Knowing their roles allow me to gives some characters skills, create a back-story by wondering how they acquired those skills.
I mix that with how they answer the basic needs of life (food, living, passion/hobby.) From there I derive their level of education and refinement (or lack of) within their society. It helps creating a family situation, which can gives me further inspiration for what thing they experimented, didn't experiment, didn't but wish they will, things that left a long-lasting impact on their personalities.

Layers tend to get added at this point, by bouncing them against other characters and they each grow as the other characters grow (in terms of back-story and personality.)

The progress goes on with the scenes. Passions and life-goals get added as I make the characters interact and comes up with reasons for why they would not only encounter each others, but also interact or/and stay together (whether they're enemies, work partners, or lovers.)
It piles up quite quickly.


As an exemple, I recently made up a couple of two young women as main characters.
The bouncing of characters/plot got the first a passion of a rather extreme sport, a distrust for offered food, and a greater sense of awareness about people around her.
The second had cybernetic implants and came from a military family (including a plot-relevant... disagreement with her father), she got a love of managing information that propelled her life-goal to management. Her dislike to the no-nonsense lifestyle of her parents led her to wishfully hope to try dresses and proper make-up rather than tidy hairs and pants. (I thus decided that there would be a scene involving a shopping session, her first experience leaving her a lot more ambiguous about it than her idealized version previously did.)

 

When I tell a story, I know the primary actors pretty much from the start. Not every little nuance about them, of course, but mostly, I know them.
As with any 3-D relationship, you don't know everything about someone the first time you meet them. The relationship grows the longer you know them and the more time you spend with them. Same with the people whose lives I am telling in my work. So, when I am on the treadmill, one (or more of them) will often run with me. (Hate that career Army guy, though. He thinks I'm in boot camp and is always screaming at me to work harder and "just another mile - you can do it"!)
But, they ride with me to/from work, trips to the market or pharmacy. We 'talk' about different things going on in their lives at a given moment. I'll ask them about an issue in which they are embroiled and they will tell me how they plan to resolve the problem. Doesn't always work that way but, usually it does.
My latest crew of pencil people will often go to bed with me at night. (Believe me, it's tough sleeping with two or three people sitting at the foot of your bed!) So, we talk about what's going on in their story. Sometimes, I just tell them to go to bed and I turn out the lights and go to sleep, myself. Then one of them will wake me up at something like two o'clock in the morning to plug some kind of a breakthrough into my head and I don't sleep the rest of the night! *yawn*

That's how to get to know them. Just like anybody else. TALK to them! =)