I never plan my stories and the characters often emerge from the setting, the worldbuilding. Basically, I put them in situations to let their character shine through. However, I've been reading Jane Eyre and I have to say, she is a master craftsman of character, they might as well be real people, in my mind. Compared to her, my characters are non existent, and I like to change that. What is your process in finding/getting to know your characters?
Very much like yours, I introduce them and let them grow, often in totally unexpected directions. It sounds wierd, but both I and @K McIntyre "take dictation" from our characters, they tell us a little bit about themselves as we write about them, as they are telling others in the story. And yes, they become very real to us
I see. Perhaps I am too harsh on myself then. Jane Eyre sure has put a damper on my confidence, though. And, besides, character is not everyone strong suit.
For me the characters always appear first in my head and then I try to figure out the world they live in. Often I get inspired by certain things. A picture I see, something I read, or an object that could be of significance to one person.
That is interesting. I'm the exact opposite and gets inspired by concepts, the "what if!" History and mythology is also a great source of inspiration.
Sometimes, but rarely, I have such an idea too, but these are the ones that I'm even less likely to turn into a real story than the character ideas. Yes, I find that too. A few months ago I was in Trier, the oldest city of Germany, founded in 16 BC as Augusta Treverorum by the Romans. It became the city from which the entiry Western Europe part of the Roman Empire was administrated. We were led through the city by a Dr. of archeology and he was very taken by the Romans of the time of emperors. He enthused about the standard of living and the technological advancements of the empire, for example the water supply in the city or the organisation of the military or that slaves were treated rather well and gladiators didn't kill each other (any more). And I thought: What if there was a world in which there was a kind of utopian version of that society? In fiction we very often find societies inspired by the Romans depicted as militaristic, hierarchic and with people killing each other in arenas. See "Hunger Games". But it would be nice if there were stories influenced by the positive aspects of what this ancient culture achieved. I would love to read something with such a setting. In general, I would like to read fantasy with a bronze age/iron age setting. I just haven't found anything of that kind yet, although there seems to be a genre of "sandal punk".
They are all behind the couch with Jesus. We usually bump into each other by accident, and then sit down and have a lengthy chat over coffee or a pint. IDK TBH. I just kinda have them crop up and away the story goes really. It is like my mind just has characters that want to be written and I am a slave of sorts to tell their stories. However there are times when I am absolute shit at it, but at least I tried to give them a fair shake.
There's a couple things that authors do that don't necessarily create bad characters (that's a whole other topic), but they certainly create unfulfilling ones. Ones that fulfill their role, sure, and they're sort of likable, I guess, but they still feel kind of "blah." We'll call these types of characters "passable" characters. In that they're not bad, but they're not your favorite, either. And that's what I think you more mean instead of the out right bad characters. It comes down to one thing: Too much reliance on popular trends and tropes and not enough on actual human nature. Remember that literature has to, in some way, mimic the human experience. That's what makes great fiction and great characters. The Hunger Games wasn't a smash hit just because. It mimicked the human experience. The turning of human suffering into a spectacle of entertainment, was unfortunately, something we relate to in this day and age. Many of the classic writers actually based many of there characters on one or more people. That's why their characters feel more authentic. Today, a lot of characters simply follow tropes. We've seen a rise of female heroes in the last decade or so, but they're all pretty much the same: the tomboyish outsider who is willing to get up and fight for survival at a moment's notice. Sometimes they try to cover it up by saying "Well, she's also into makeup." Okay cool, so am I, but it still doesn't change she's just a cut out. In real life, a lot of women are nurturing and agreeable. They don't know how to fight and they don't want to know how to fight. They like babies and they don't look for a career as much as they look for something that gives them work and life balance. These aren't weak women. They are capable of carrying a story, yet no one uses them because like a game of Eukre, they're just following suit. Their dialogue lacks... well, character. Merely passable characters also have merely passable dialogue. It either mimics real speech too much or too little. Again, this goes back to people mimicking pop culture as opposed to actually looking to real life. The trick to writing good dialogue is listening to how real people talk, and pulling out those little threads of personality. I remember talking to this lady on the phone, and I was getting her information to file an insurance claim for her. And everything is pretty normal until I ask for her husband's cell phone number. She replied, "Oh, no hun. He ain't into none of that witchcraft." That is an example of a thread of personality that's found in otherwise a pretty mundane conversation. Unfortunately, most writers don't do this. Instead, they try and mimic dialogue from their favorite shows. They think things like "I like how Tony Stark (Iron Man) is so quirky in Avengers. That's perfect for my character. I'm going to write their dialogue like that." And then they scratch their heads why all the people critiqing their work is calling that character annoying and just carbon copy of Tony Stark, "But I only based him off Tony Stark! He's quit different because [insert superficial difference here.]" If it quacks like a duck then it's a duck! If they have taken two seconds to interact with real people, they'd find enough quirky people in real life that they could mold an original character from. Or they have the opposite problem, and just write dialogue that really goes nowhere. Has nothing to do with the story and is boring. While too people talking will often have pointless conversations, it's not how you develop characters. Finally, they don't know how to translate fact to fiction. They don't know how to translate the workaholic boss who brags about his 60+ hour weeks, who constantly telling his employees how they're not good enough into that oppressive religious figure who flaunts his own righteousness. They don't know how to translate the girl whose addicted to social media, into a princess in a castle who is starved for attention. Lousy writers see no connection. "How does being in a castle have anything to do with social media? I don't get it," they say. And "My boss ins't religious. So I can't see how I could turn that into a religious figure." Well, good writers see past the circumstance and into the actual character of the person. Sure, the religious character would serve his role in the story, but if you just sprinkled in a few of the boss's traits, he could have been good.
They wander in from the mist. They are rather homogenous to begin with, just like real people are blank slates when you first meet them. Until you actually engage a person in the real world, they're just another tetrapod in a sea of tetrapods, going about their tetrapod days. I write them through a throw-away story. Someone else may call that creating a backstory, and that's fine if that's how they want to see it, but for me it's important to view this story as a throw-away. It gives me the freedom to work through the character as a rough draft. Not the plot, not the happenstances, but the character. It's perfectly fine if behavior is a little erratic and unformed in the throw-away story. We have a real-world term - erratic behavior - because that's actually a perfectly normal mode of human behavior. We are often erratic, capricious, unpredictable creatures. We are seldom the steady, perfectly-in-character people we meet in books. That's not real; that's a distillation in the same way that book dialogue isn't remotely representative of normal human communication, it's also a distillation. It's also important for me to view this story as a throw-away because this isn't the moment for me to feel committed or parental about the writing. These aren't my children, yet. Anyway, that's what I do.
Characters are actually one of the first things I figure out before writing a story, even if it's only the main character(s) I create first. Secondary/side characters can be created spontaneously, depending on what the story needs as things progress. I ask myself what kind of story I want to write, and that determines the characters and the setting. I have no hard or fast rules about it, it's mostly intuitive.
hello all, I am new to all this as I am trying to become a writer. I am currently working on a manuscript that I started a year ago. I am finding that my characters are mostly developing themselves. I am not sure if i fully understand the mechanics of good writing. Even though my work is fiction, I am trying to infuse as much real life as possible. If this is not the place for these questions, could someone advise me as to where i could ask??
There are at least two seperate questions in your post. With regards to characterization, I would suggest you think a moment on what your question actually is, what you want to learn in that regard, and then post a new thread in the Character Development subforum. Honed questions garner more precise answers. As regards "the mechanics of good writing", that is a very broad question. Again, I would think on exactly what you're trying to ask - be it narrative structure, good dialogue, clear voice of characters, technical matters regarding syntax, punctuation, etc. - and post threads in the corresponding subforums for those questions. Again, honed questions garner more precise engagement.
I think in general Rome is depicted just as you said. But in fact our whole concept of civil rights stems from Roman law, inalienable rights that a citizen had that not even an emperor like Nero could deny. When Nero blamed the small Christian community in Rome in 64AD for the fire and put the lot of them to horrendous deaths, Paul, who was a citizen, could only be beheaded, and after a trial. And anyone, even a slave, could aspire to citizenship, it wasn't restricted to class or place of birth... Paul was a Jew, born a citizen though Judaean by birth. How THAT happened might itself make an interesting story, something significant his father did?. It seems small, but that concept was where it all began. It wasn't utopia, our world is certainly not today, but it was a beginning. Citizenship and Roman honor is the crux of the central conflict in my book, which does give a different perspective on many different things of the era
For me, developing the cast is just as important as the setting, and the two are often symbiotic--this character can illustrate this bit of the setting, this aspect of the setting would be a great origin for a character. I usually come up with a list of traits and curious things about the character. These could be literally anything, such as facts about them, a quote they might say, or a random quirk they have. Such as: --Just starting her second year of university. --Sacrificed an eye for magical power. --"When I touched the flower, it bloomed in a few seconds, and then died." --Hates the smell of hospitals. --Has a very awkward relationship with her brother-in-law. --Raised in a religious commune that views old technology as a temptation. --Keeps a half-dozen dead bodies in his basement, which never decay. I may change some of this, or it might not come up in the story, but it gives me a picture of who they are.
My novel started with one character that I knew I wanted to write a book about, a book of my own. Then the story came to me, in an unrelated event. But I knew it couldn't be about her, for reasons that would take too much effort to explain here, so I needed a main character. That main character was, as a person, what the story I was trying to tell needed him to be--young-ish, naive, loyal to his superiors, and kind of stubborn and thick-headed when presented with things that went against his worldview. Now, that didn't make the entirety of his character--is he nice? Is he funny? Is he a teriyaki guy or sweet 'n' sour? How does he feel about the people around him? Is he a man of one-liners, or soulful wit? These things came about as an almost...organic process of writing him. I put him in situations, and watched what happened. Turns out, he's humble. He's one of the best ship's pilots in the galaxy, but he doesn't like to boast. He's scared of certain things, like overly powerful mages or technology he doesn't understand. He wants what's best for the galaxy--he wants what's best for its people...or at least, what he thinks is best. Turns out he's very, very wrong, but he doesn't understand that until it's far too late. He's full of what he thinks is righteous hate--and it makes him kind of dumb. It makes him, dare I say it, human. That's all he is. He's human. He's you, and me, and all of us. That's what he was meant to be, but how he defines himself within his world is a matter of how he interacts with it--and that, I don't know until I've written him.
Sometimes if I get an idea for a character I really like i'll write a short story, usually an extract that might go in the book, or not, and see how the character develops. Sometimes I imagine the most difficult situation for the character to be in and then develop a piece around that. The last one was a female char. who I wanted to be a physio. so I had her in a prison accidentally locked in an office with a big brutal prisoner for a whole day. (never mind how the accidental locking in happened, it's a bit tenuous and not even I believe it.)
Trial and error Mostly error In terms of general principle, there are three main axes of character-building that I learned about in a Great Course: Imagination / Observation – How much do you create your characters from whole cloth, and how much do you base them on other people (either from reality and/or from other people's fictions)? Personally, my character-building tends to be about 95% Imagination-driven, whereas my father says that his character-building is closer to 70% Observation-driven. Psychological / Circumstantial – how much do you focus on what makes your characters unique as individuals, and how much do you focus on your characters as sociological reflections of the world that they've grown up in? Personally, I generally try to aim as close to 50/50 on this axis as possible; I'm more interested in my characters' natures and their nurtures combined than I am in just one or the other. Inside-Out / Outside-In – how much do you start with a character's values and psychology, later using this to inform you of their appearance, mannerisms, and actions, and you much do you start with a character's appearance, mannerisms, and actions, later using this to inform you of their values and psychology? This is actually an axis where I'm constantly jumping back and forth from one end to the next. In general, looking only at the very beginning of my process and the very end, I work for the most part Outside-In (starting with what my characters are doing, then working out what kind of people they are that makes it so important to them that they do it), but at any point between that, I could be coming up with a new idea for my characters' actions that forces me to rethink their motivations, or I could be coming up with a new idea for my characters' motivations that forces me to rethink their actions. @Stammis It sounds like your character-building process is primarily Circumstantial and Outside-In – you focus on what your characters do and on the world around them that they do it in – but that you want to do Psychological and/or Inside-Out instead. If your current approach legitimately doesn't work for you, then by all means, start using the Psychological and/or Inside-Out approaches, but is it possible that you only think this approach doesn't work because you've been convinced "a 'real' writer has to build characters through the Psychological and Inside-Out approaches"?
Thank you for that very helpful answer! To answer your question: I think that might be the case, perhaps I idolize Charlotte a bit. I've also come to realise that character develops differently depending on the story. For instance, I wrote, a few years back a heroes journey story where I developed a fantasy world, it's struggles and problems and then I place the characters in this world and they kinda naturally developed because the world was developed. E.i Circumstantial and Outside-In, as you mentioned. I've tried to apply this strategy to other types of stories, for instance a coming of age story, but that didn't work very well. Somehow, I know what the characters will do and I always end up with a finished plot but I'm never certain why they do it, (at least not during the drafting stage) which makes the middle part of the story a bit bare; no motivations and things just kinda happen. I wonder in which order you should begin with such stories? Write the draft; flesh out the characters, meaning create a backstory for each up to where the novel begins; then edit the plot and everything else?
My story started with an idea what I wanted to write about, and then a vivid situation where I saw my MC act a certain way. I didn't know anything else, either about him nor about the story. To get the character 'fleshed out', and to also get the storyline, I'm reasoning back- and forward from this situation, applying the old maxim 'be your characters worst nightmare' and see the situation and the MC change in response. Which experiences did the MC need to have to react this way? Which settings need to be in place for him to trigger this response? If he made a mistake with his reaction, how does it change him and the overall setting? Which triggers which next response from him? Sometimes I'm introducing not-so-random events that impact on the situation from outside (bonus points if the character has set the events in motion himself, unconsciously, much, much earlier in the story—think butterfly effect). There's no set rulebook how to develop your story. The above is my own approach. It seems to work for me, but I suspect it's not the most streamlined or coherent one.
I do that. I didn't realize it until I read your post, but your explanation tripped enough of my alarm bells that I'm certain it applies to me. Thanks for getting this information out there; it's as if you pointed out a toxic part of my diet.
There aren't a lot of "should"s in writing I'm constantly editing as I go, so by the time I finish a first draft, I already have a lot of that done
It's a long process for me. Usually, I brainstorm basic ideas for characters, until one sticks with me. Once that happens, I'll sometimes just write random ideas I have for them down, or I'll think up scenes of them. Every time I get a new idea, I'll write it down, and revise it over time. If I think about it too hard, it usually ends up being counter-productive, so I'll either let the idea sit, or write without thinking for awhile (I think they call it pantsing). One thing that I find helps is to write down dialogue that your character says. You don't have to come up with a whole conversation, or even use the quote in your story. Just come up with a random situation, and write down what you think your character would say if they were in that position. For example, how would your character introduce themselves, bargain with a car dealer, or talk to a person they have a crush on? You can also just have them give their thoughts on certain things (race, sex, religion, etc.). Just be sure to do it in their voice, and make sure it feels natural (trust me, if it's forced it will show). Other times, a character design comes to me, and I invent a personality surrounding it. Character design is an underrated art form in my opinion, as it can say a lot about a character.
