... that's just my thoughts on that subject...

Maybe because I'm a control freak, but I tend to be drawn to the stories where average, good-enough Joe gets choas dumped unfairly on his shoulders and has to work through it. I like solutions and you can't have a solution without a problem.

Both in reading and writing, I need a character that is realistic. If the character is going to have super-powers, the super powers have to be something simple at root, but fantastic once explained. So, using enough philosophy and facts, a real super-hero is created.

Build the plot from the person. Build the person from the people you see around you.

The woman who talks on her cell phone even when she has nothing to say. The kid at the mall whose pants are down at mid-butt level and is drawing tattoos with permanant marker in the food court. The father who has a hard time talking to his daughters. The mother who won't let her children do chores because she's so OCD that nobody can do anything in the house right. The homeschooler. The mailman. The embezzler. The volunteer.

Once you have the person and you can see through their eyes, you can find the event that will make your story. I can relate to the father -- because I'm married to that man -- so I know what I'd have to do to make this story. Determine the greatest fear of all fathers everywhere: being the reason for his daughter's pain.

Greg Alson is a reporter for the local, small town papers. But Greg has a gift. He's always had a gift. He doesn't just know news, he knows things that are about to happen. Not much advance notice, but enough to know he has a secret that has to be kept. He knows that if someone finds out, he may be taken away. And that CAN'T happen. Because who would raise the girls? Greg has two teenage daughters. One is thirteen and the other eighteen. The eighteen year old has just begun college when she is kidnapped. Greg discovers that someone does know about his secret, only they have it all wrong. They think he can control things, that he can change things. The kidnapper blames Greg for something that has happened to his sister, (if you want to get a couple of extra coincidences, she can be the same age as Greg's daughter). Now Greg has to figure out how to get to his older daughter... Whatever he decides to do, he starts to do it and halfway through, he has one of his mini-precognitions, about his other daughter. (Having to chose between them, that would suck) And knowing me, I'd make it complicated, so that close to the end, the eldest daughter reveals that she, too, has a bit of hereditory precog in her. So, she sees the father's deliema, and takes things into her own hand.

I always incorporate tragedy into my stories. In other words, someone's gonna die. And the reader won't like it. But as a reader, I hate how almost everyone who I don't want to die, somehow miraculously survives. For me, its like, "Okay, I believed you up until this point, but that's so unrealistic, I can't buy the rest of the story either." So, I make a world that is real and consequences that are real. And every point of view is taken, including completely irrelevant characters who only have one scene. Even when/if the bad guy gets it, you can relate to him.

That's how I make my people and build plots. I very rarely use the plot to make the people.

 

So, who out there also starts with characters?
 

I’m easy to pick out of the group. Look for the short, skinny man with the bad haircut and orthopedic shoes. I wear glasses in this day and age when perfect vision is a considered a right, not a privilege. I take the glasses off and wipe at the fog forming on the lenses. My eyes need replacement. New eyes. That is provided for by neither the government back on Mars nor the company I work for.

I had a tough time finding someone to work with him but...in an elevator on the station...he meets this boy with metal eyes. Bingo. These two have chemistry between them.
 

I remember one time, when I was thinking about my current novel, and the character in it. I was at work, sitting down, one part of my mind occupied with my job and the other thinking about the lead character. I had developed extensive background for this character, even writing about ten thousand words of straightforward biography.

Rather abruptly, I had the horrible realization that I had fallen in love with my own creation. (Disgusting, isn't it?)

Though I've tried several times, and even though I have a clear idea of what happens next, I've never been able to push this past the first couple of chapters.

As for the love, well...I've never met her and I never will. Best to let it go...
 

To some degree, I agree with the adage that you send your character up a tree, throw rocks at him/her, and get them safely down. I find Algis Budrys's advice--make your character try and fail two times before discovering what they need to change to make it work--the most difficult, so therefore the most interesting. (It's so difficut because you have to make him see the solution in an original way...and that originality is the most difficult.)
 

In my novel, and in my series, I have two main characters. They are the great advesaries, though the lines dividing good and evil can get hazy. After reading the first, I had a reader say that one of the key supporting players was obviously a representation of myself. I found that odd, because I created her to be a quasi-heroine and with some of the qualities that I do respect and at times try to emmulate, but I never thought of her as a personification of myself.

In fact, I believe that any character created is a (excuse me, I'm sorry, can't help it, I really can't think of a more appropriate comparison)"child of the mind". In my writing, at least, each of my characters have a little of me in them. Some of them have similar childhood memories or have the same bad habits. That includes the bad guys. The bad from one of my bad guys comes directly from something I saw in myself and have tried to stamp out. They also wear glasses (like me) or ponytails (like me) and rarely care how they dress (also like me.)

I guess that is what makes it real for me. But what I struggle with, is how to make it real for others? My greatest fear is that my severe social retardation -- I just don't do my current social surroundings well -- will crossover into my writing. How can readers relate to characters based on core characteristics of a writer who can't relate to people in person?

I think the ultimate goal is to create a sort of immortal character. Making a great character will render the arguement that there are only a handful of real plots, moot.

Of course, there's the other problem I have, where I became so wrapped up with my original characters, even the bit-players, that I couldn't write a completely new story. The first story screamed for closure and I actually felt I owed it to my boys. I'm unable to write anything else until I feel satisfied that I'm done telling their story. So, a crush isn't so bad, I mean, really that's just an emotional connection, and I'm sure just about all passionate writers feel that way. Other people may think that it's a little odd to have an emotional connection with something that isn't, strictly speaking, real, but some also think that Reality TV depicts real emotions.
 

quote:

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In my writing, at least, each of my characters have a little of me in them.

---

If you consider that all you really know about anyone is what you've collected in your own mind, then not only are the characters you write about part of yourself, but your images of the real people you know are, too.

This is one reason I don't think people have to worry about using people they know as characters in their stories. The character motivations you come up with for characters, even the ones based on people you know, are actually motivations that come from your own guesses about them. So the person you know and the person you think that person is may not be all that much alike anyway.

Did that make sense?

The only time you might have to worry about people you know "recognizing" themselves in a story is if you base your plot on something that happened to someone you know, or if you based your dialog on something said by someone you know.

But creating a character from your perception of another person, which is actually part of your own thought processes and understandings, is really only from you.
 

My most recent protagonist is a conflation character who's inspired by assorted individuals on this and other online forums, plus people I've encountered in person. The tipping point, though, came from particular contradictory characteristics of a particular individual here at the Hatrack workshop forum. Fully knowing the protagonist has brought all the other elements into focus and now the story writing is progressing satisfactorily.

[This message has been edited by extrinsic (edited August 16, 2008).]
 

I often start with a character that seems interesting on the surface. Perhaps like dragonfox, I wonder what if there was a character like so-and-so. It could be no more complicated than "a 12-year-old female chess prodigy." With only a vague notion of the story, I write dialog to flesh out that character until I really like the character. Then (and I highly recommend this), I flail in the wind trying to come up with a story to fit the character, and sometimes do.

I also often wag the tale by the doggerel by starting with a spiffy title and working backwards from that. I like to call that "high-concept thinking." (Makes me feel good about that method; I have a notebook full of unactualized titles...I mean, high concepts.)
 

I have an idea that will probably become my NaNo for November. The idea started late 2007 when I was working on a case about an airplane with an expert witness, pilot and mechanic. We spent a lunch talking about death by plane i.e. ways to kill the passanger but not the pilot in a particular airplane. From that, the rest of the conspiracy has been roughed it. Why aren't I writing it yet? I still don't have a handle on the main character. Hopefully I'll know more about him/her before I have to write the story in November.

Some times its both. I love magic, and so I've writen more than one story that started out with the idea of a character who wields a particular type of magic and has, usually, some related personality traits.

Some times it begins with a character, but usually theres also an idea linked to it. Of course to me ideas, characters and plot are all just aspects of the same thing...the story.
 

I start with characters, then I like to put them in places they don't want to be and see how they react.

When I started writing it was fanfiction so the characters were already there for me, but I needed/wanted to know more about them.

When I wrote Emergency! fic I wanted to get down to the feelings or the what ifs of it all.

From there I frankensteined characters from shows I had watched and built up my own source to choose from for those days when I was bored and needed something to do.

I ran a writing ...oh how to say...forum where I provided the plotline and such and several ladies added characters. Think AD&D via AIM chatroom and you may have a picture however fuzzy.

I created dozens of characters for the writers to interact with. Twice, in the three years we wrote, two characters I wrote died and twice I had emails from the ladies telling me how deeply sad they were to see them gone.

We all grew attached to them. One was a little girl and another was an older teen boy who was begining to show some promise.

I guess my characters are part of me and at the risk of sounding silly, I miss them when they are gone like that.

Pal...puttin in way to many cents that aren't making any sense

[This message has been edited by Palaytiasdreams (edited August 28, 2008).]
 

A good one stumbled in last night, actually. If I can hang on to her for long enough, I might have something to write about when I finally finish this Dread Beast I call a novel.
 

If you start with character the challenge is finding a plot in which they a good opportunity to "do something interesting" so your reader can see how truly interesting they are and become as engaged with them as you are.

If you start with plot, the challenge is filling it with characters who aren't merely cardboard cutouts walking through the motions you've set out for them. At some point they have to come alive (hopefully sooner rather than later).

Of course this leads to all sorts of other problems. i've ahd at least one plot generated story develop a character who was so much more engaging than any of the others that I wound up rewriting the story around him (basically trashing the plot I'd come up with first). But that's the fun of it isn't it?
 

here is what I've got so far.

I think I have both figured out. First, what to do with it, which is write it of course. The second, where it came from. I'm starting to think it is a combination of what if, event driven and character based.

initially It was character, based on myself, building a fantasy world to live in where I got what I wanted because It sure wasn't happening here, at the time I was unemployed with bleak prospects (It was during the tech crash, and I'm a computer programmer by trade).

Anyhow, then I started asking what if questions.

What if an ancient mythological society (I have a specific one in mind) wasn't just myth, but an ancient people who at one time ruled this entire planet (and more)...

What if they were caught up in a war that resulted in the world being destroyed by massive earthquakes, volcanoes, floods and the like...

what if we are the descendants of survivors, and simply don't remember any or the pre-holocaust world which to us is nothing but mythological, but there are also survivors who escaped into space and other worlds who remember everything and have returned building hidden cities among us...

What if their war was about to comeback and haunt them, and us...

What if the future rested one man (The character I initially started with, an average Joe who has access to dormant characteristic that came from his ancient ancestors) and one woman (a modern member of the advanced human race), one from each group who must come together and combine to produce the answer to everyone's survival...

My problem now is developing realistic challenges to help my protagonist develop into the hero he needs to be.

Is this normal for SF writers, or am I flying around out here in lalaland?

 

I do have at least one character running around in my head waiting for the right story. He isn't the right fit for anything, yet. Don't worry, Big Guy, it'll come along.

[This message has been edited by Meredith (edited February 27, 2009).]
 

If you're seeking assistance specific to your plot you can post a query to the "Writing Class."
 

That way I have the idea and begin the character before I figure out the plot.
 

Then, naturally, I go sit in front of my computer and stare at the blank document... :P
 

1. A character (or characters).

2. Something fundamental and all-important the character wants

3. Something substantial that opposes the character gaining the want

The latter two comprise what many term a situation, so you could say character plus situation. Also they can come in reverse order, i.e., a character that's happy until something substantial comes along to threaten/take away what the character wants (e.g., the character's child is kidnapped).

It could also be argued that item 2 is part of item 1.

Technically, I may be inspired by any of the three items first, but until I have all three, I find it hard to move forward with much direction.

It's basically model espoused by Jerry Cleaver in "Immediate Fiction" and similar to some of the ideas in Frey's "How to Write a Damn Good Novel".
 

Conversely, if you start with a character, look for the thing that hurts that character the most.