Hatrack River Writers Workshop: Creating Characters

This is topic Creating Characters in forum Open Discussions About Writing at Hatrack River Writers Workshop.

To visit this topic, use this URL:
http://www.hatrack.com/ubb/writers/ultimatebb.php?ubb=get_topic;f=1;t=002377

Posted by SimonMRhees (Member # 2777) on :

I am new to this forum (and kind of new to the writing scene in general) and I had a quesiton for anyone willing to write an anwser. How do you guys create characters? I mean fleshed out, 3 dimensional, believable ones. Somewhere along the line, while creating my story, I ended up with a handful of characters I like, but at times I don't feel like they're complete enough. So I was hoping that others may be interested in sharing their techniques for creating characters. I tried writing Biographies for each of them, but I got so bogged down I lost interest after a few minutes. That just made too much unecessary background noise. I picked up a copy of the Gotham Writers' Workshop Writing Fiction, and they had a few suggestions, I was just wondering what other people did.

Posted by Elan (Member # 2442) on :

The following is an adaptation of the character profile I use. I find that once I know the details of the profile, the characters are very easy to write for. I suggest you pick your Main Character and go with that. Fill out as much detail as you can, and keep adding to the document as you learn more about your character. The whole point of character development, is that the character DEVELOPS as you write. That means there will be some changes. Use the profile as a template but don't feel chained to it.

Here is the document I use to create character profiles for myself:

Writing Your Character Profile

Basic Information
* Character Name:
* Player Name:
* Gender:
* Race (species): (Include description if a non-standard race.)
* Profession, Social Class, or Caste:

Physical description
What does your character look like? What is he/she wearing, hair color, eye color etc. There is no requirement about what to and what not to include. Simply paint a written picture of how others would see your character.
* Age:
* Height:
* Weight:
* Hair Color:
* Eye Color:
* Clothing Style:

Personality
Include a short paragraph on how your character comes across to other people? Is he/she friendly or aloof? How does your character think, feel, and what goes on inside his/her mind? Role-playing is more then just action and words. Make your character come alive. Your profile should give an idea of who your character is and not just what he/she is.

Your personality statement might include some of the following: Is your character an introvert or extrovert? More thinking or feeling? What are his/her fears and phobias? Does your character have any dirty little secrets? What is their lifetime ambition, deepest secret or wildest fantasy? Are they selfish or selfless? Does your character have a sense of humor? What makes him or her laugh? What do you see as the biggest contradiction(s) your character lives out?

Proficiencies
What does your character do best? Summarize your characters skills and talents.You might include: physical abilities, physical limitations, talents/skills, or specialization.

Non-proficiencies
The most intriguing and realistic characters have a nice mixture of strength and weakness. Good writing doesn't create flat cardboard style characters of pure goodness or utter evilness, but instead paints a realistic portrait of many hues and shades of gray. Oftentimes a character’s flaws make them far more interesting than their proficiencies.What is your character's weakest traits?
What does he/she struggle with? What does your character secretly wish he/she could improve upon or rise above?

Character Backstory
You do not have to include a complete background in your story: this isn't a complete autobiography. However your back story should be sufficient to give you an idea of what motivates them, and what has influenced them to become the person they are today. You don't have to answer each one of these items, but they will give you ideas for fleshing out your character's personality. The more you include, the greater understanding you will have of your character.

Some suggestions of what you can include are:
Place of birth:
Father:
Mother:
Siblings:
Friends/significant relationships:
Did they have a good or bad childhood?
What struggles have they had?
Were they forced into their current path or did they choose it?
Do they have any regrets?

Philosophy and Morality
Attitudes toward:
Self:
Others:
Friendship:
Sex:
Love:
Family:
Marriage:
The world:
Superstitions:

Life & Life Style
Social Class:
Education:
Hobbies:
Professional affiliations:
Favorite activity:
Least favorite activity:
Habits & odd quirks:

[This message has been edited by Elan (edited August 21, 2005).]

Posted by Beth (Member # 2192) on :

Like Simon, I get bored writing character profiles and biographies. Most of the time I don't do any specific character work at all.

I have had some luck writing monologues from the character's POV, which gives me a way to get inside their head and look around.

I also try to identify a few character traits, both good and bad. Maybe she's brave and intelligent but also pretty selfish. I try to identify what each character wants, and why and the kinds of things they're willing to do to get what they want.

Posted by Miriel (Member # 2719) on :

Motive is always my biggest question. What does this character want? What drives them? Why do they do what they do? Two people may act similarly in similar situations, but maybe for different reasons. Example: being polite at dinner. One character may be trying to show off how well-bred he is, and thus make everyone else feel like a slob -- making good manners a way to be more powerful. Another might like the people she's eating with, and wants to be polite to better enjoy their company. Another might be terribly afraid of offending others: thus he practiced careful, perfect manners to give no offense.

I like to make character sheets. I write down eye/hair/height so I'm consistent through the story, and then I ask question about their motives. When I get to scene and don't know how a character would react, or if I've written it and they've just done what I would have done in their place, I examine my motives sheet. I think about how I've had them act throughout the rest of the novel. Consistency, I think, is one of the things that brings reality to characters. By that, I don't mean that character's shouldn't change. For instance, in my WIP, I had a critiquer complain now and again in different scenes, "This character is acting like a kid! I'm starting to hate him!" Those were the scenes that I just put in what I would have done, because I didn't know how to write it. Going back over scenes with the character's motives and personality firmly in mind, and editing out the extraneous, helped me to make that character more real, and less an extention of my will and the plot.

Posted by Kathleen Dalton Woodbury (Member # 59) on :

A recent discussion on creating characters:

http://www.hatrack.com/forums/writers/forum/Forum1/HTML/002281.html

Posted by Christine (Member # 1646) on :

I have to admit, I can't stand those complex character profiles. I find it bogs me down in useless information and often fails to get to the heart of what makes the character a person. I've done profiles so detailed they asked about the shape of the nose and eyebrows and whether or not they had pets growing up. SOMETIMES that's important, but you know when.

What I like to do now is write an AUTObiography for my important characters. Biographies are boring and get bogged down by meaningless details. When I pretend to be the character and write from their POV, I tend to focus on what mattered in my (character's) life. As an example:

Biography:

Jane was molested by her father when she was twelve. This made her feel like an unworthy slut, caused her to have sex too young with a boy named Danny Fields, and led to her life of prostitution.

Autobiography:

My dad raped me when I was twelve. He liked to say I was his special girl and it was our little secret. I liked to daydream that his dick melted off. Then one day he caught me in my bedroom with Danny Fields. Danny had his ....[crass details]...Dad called me a slut and beat me blue but he never came back. His dick never melted off either.

***

What does the second one do that the first doesn't? It begins to unveil some of the things about a character that cannot be put into words but the very things that make them real ... attitude and personality. When they ask you on a character sketch, what is their personality like? You end up filling in "low self-esteem, slutty, crass..." but do any of these words really tell you who Jane is? Does the background that she was molested tell you that? I never thought it did, but when I stand aside and let her speak out of my mouth and fingertips for a half hour or an hour I am always amazed at what I discover.

The thing is, all the pet goldfish in the world later, you still may not have harnessed that "it" factor. Some of my most belieavble characters have come after very litle thought at all.

Another technique you might try is to think about who you know well. What makes *them* real to you? Is it that you know they have three brothers and a sister or is it that they always crack jokes and are never serious except for this one time when they confided to you in secret that their mother had walked out on them when they were five and they always wanted to know why. I'm guessing that the sibling don't matter nearly as much as their genuine human frailty underneath the humorous defense mechanism.

Anyway, just some thoughts.

Posted by Kathleen Dalton Woodbury (Member # 59) on :

Christine, I really like that suggestion.

Reminds me of something I did with a friend once while I was developing characters for a novel. She would write letters to my characters and ask them questions, and I would write back to her, as the characters, and answer her questions. It really helped them to come alive in my mind.

Posted by Kathleen Dalton Woodbury (Member # 59) on :

Another thing you can do is find some way to help you visualize the character.

I like to "cast" my stories with actors living or dead (usually based on the way an actor played a certain character in a movie), but you can just go through a magazine or a catalog and find faces that look the way you imagine your characters to look.

If possible, cut the faces out and put them in your story notebook, to refer to as needed.

Posted by wbriggs (Member # 2267) on :

See OSC's book Character & Viewpoint, especially the chapter on characters with complex motivations.

Posted by mikemunsil (Member # 2109) on :

A while back, JB Skaggs generously had his graphic artist draw up some sletches for some of my Bridgetown characters. It was amazing. After a few episodes of going back and forth, all of a sudden there they were! Particularly the one character I thought I would have the most trouble identifying with, a teenage female character, Billie.

So, see if you can get someone to draw some sketches for you.

Posted by SimonMRhees (Member # 2777) on :

Thanks so much everybody! I've just been kind of overwhelmed every time I try and sit to down sketch out the characters. I have them in my head, but somewhere between there and the page I totally lose interest. Christine, that's a good idea. Thanks.
Mikemunsil, heh, funny you should bring that up. I tried to draw my characters, because I know that would help me (I'm a pretty visually oriented person), but all I could muster out of my amazingly proficient skills with the pen were a few mushy looking stick people. It was embarrasing, so they went to the garbage. But that's a good idea. I'll try and find somebody who can sketch them out.
Also, in case anyone else is interested, this afternoon I was searching online and found this thing from the GWW website. The questionaire format works well for me. It's fun to do.

http://www.writingclasses.com/InformationPages/index.php/PageID/106

Posted by Mechwarrior (Member # 2796) on :

Some really great comments from Christine (gee, what a surprise ; ^ )

I like the autobiography idea. I always do the quick biography paragraph thing myself. The longer the piece the more likely I am to force myself to write a detailed bio sheet. Elan posted a nice one. If you really like to micro-manage your characters check out this bio sheet:

http://home.comcast.net/~rthamper/html/char_profile.htm

Posted by djvdakota (Member # 2002) on :

There's also this very old thread in Writing Class:

http://www.hatrack.com/forums/writers/forum/Forum5/HTML/000012.html

Posted by Silver3 (Member # 2174) on :

I've been doing the autobiography one for years (except I do it in third-person limited, but it works fine for me). It is a great way to see what makes a character tick.

Posted by JOHN (Member # 1343) on :

I tend to believe that if you don't have a character, then you don't have story. Sure, your character my evlove and change and grow, not just in the context of your story but as you develop him for yourself as you write. (what I'm trying to say is the character first in your head may not be the charcter you first envisioned by the time you get to page 200)

But I always come up with characters first. They just pop up, and then the story falls into place.

My American Revolution story is sitting with the first few pages written and nothing else as I don't really know my main character yet. Just can't get a bead on him. I have a pretty decent story fleshed out, but I can't really get anywhere until I know him a little better.

JOHN!

Posted by squimi (Member # 2810) on :

I'm not keen on the massively detailed biographies either.
The detail I need to begin with is name (hugely important), vague family background (parents - alive or dead; siblings etc), and some idea of what the character looks like - hair and eye colour and build is enough for me.
I find that the rest evolves with the story.
As for getting to understand characters better, the technique that's worked best for me is the interview technique.
Simply, you write out a scene with yourself interviewing the character. You can just ask them general questions - 'What are you most afraid of?' or you can ask them specific questions about a point in the story - 'How did you feel when you knew she'd discovered your secret identity?'
I've found this to be incredibly illuminating - I've used it a couple of times when I got stuck with difficult scenes in my novel, and it gave me tonnes of useful material, all told in the character's own 'voice'.
David Gerrold talks about this technique in his book 'Worlds of Wonder' - I owe him!
squimi

Posted by cklabyrinth (Member # 2454) on :

Has anyone ever tried doing an autobiography for the character based on each of the entrys in a sheet such as the one Elan posted?

That seems like it would work well to me and although it will probably be time consuming I think I'll try it.

Posted by dpatridge (Member # 2208) on :

I'm actually doing that for a female character I've made ck... It is an interesting endeavor.

Posted by tchernabyelo (Member # 2651) on :

I've never written any formal character notes for any of my MCs. I tend to get to know them as I write. I have a number of MCs who I know "inside out", I'm totally comfortable withh them, I know them arguably as well as I know myself. However, if I tried to do the sort of comprehensive biography as described above, I don't think I'd be able to fill in some sections. For me, it's about feeling the characters, and no amount of description about their past or appearance or even personality can do that.

I did an exercise once, where I "interviewed" a set of my characters at a particularly important point in the novel sequence. I just wrote a bunch of dialogue, in which some mysterious, faceless group interrogated the characters (each individually). It was particularly entertaining to do as one of the characters involved was dead by that stage...

I think the autobiography idea is really good. Using the character's voice will help you get a real feel for them, and you'll also learn what they do and don't think is "important" in their lives.

One final note - remember that real people have mood swings. Some more than others, but we are NOT predicatable robots. Sometimes my characters will do "atypical" things because they're angry and upset. If you can slip into their character, you can handle that well; if you're just working off a bio, there's a risk they'll just conform to basic programming, no more.

Posted by Mystic (Member # 2673) on :

I recommmend using the profiler that Elan has provided, but only use the info from the profile that is important to the story. The whole point of the profile is so when you go to write, you know your characters better than yourself.