McAnally's (The Community Pub) > Author Craft

Hark! (Characters)

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becroberts:
Sometimes I'll have a great-sounding idea for a character name and their personality and background automatically fills itself in based on that name. Other times I'll have a need for a particular type of character first, and the name and other details come in later. Courtesy of wacky RPG-creating with my brother, I have a stock of a hundred or so characters with names, looks and personalities that I draw on and adapt to suit my purposes in a story. There's a certain amount of mixing and matching involved, of course, and I do occasionally throw in personality quirks or history inspired by RL people and events. That's one of the great joys of writing fantasy - it's okay for characters to be as offbeat and strange as you need them to be!

Because I write mainly from a first-person perspective, it isn't often that other characters show up to demand that the story be all about them. The characters with the most extreme/memorable traits tend to be given smaller roles anyway, so they make the most of their moments to shine  :D

The Corvidian:
Mine usually come from dreams.

Roaram:
From the posts I've read, I may be the odd man out. In my stories I have always created the universe as a whole before I come up with a plot  or a character. Granted, sometimes the universe comes from acool scene in my head, but the character or plot isn't the big deal in the begining.  Once the universe is established, I then create a conflict, something that people in the world will have a problem with. Or a bad guy hatches some fiendish plot, like blowing up a moon, or usurping a throne, or maybe making some quick cash. Then I ask around for someone who would want to solve this conflict, and then once I find said character of charter, I ask why they would be involved. After I have the characters and their motivation, I ask how would they go about solving the conflict. It keeps the charters in their skill set, and keeps me from throwing in a whammy just to get the character out of some jam. Unfortuantly several of my favorite characters died in their heroic attempts, simply because I-they couldn't find a way out of a tight spot. On a side note, does anybody else feel like you some how let a character down when you kill them?

trboturtle:
I approach Characters from the POV of "What is their purpose?" Then I decide how to make them unique, starting with something that forms the core -- apperance, personality, name -- something that I can build a character around

Example: For a Fanfic based on the anime series Bubblegum Crisis, a cyberpunk-style series. A trio of police officers are visiting a underground contact for data on a vigilante. The contact is a gang leader by the name of Skeeter Karns. So how to make him stand out?

First, I made Karns a giant -- large man, powerfully built. Then I decided that this guy had an IQ of 180. So he's smart and strong. But how to make him stand out even more?

I decided that Karns was an orphen that had seen the dark side of the city and decided to do something about it, but in his own way. He became a powerful gang leader who rules a large district. But unlike most gang leaders, he doesn't terrorize the district. In fact, he acts more like a benovolent dictator. He helps the people, puts kids back into school and encourages them to go on to college, establishes clinics and helps the orphanage whenever he can. The police leave him alone because his area is one of the few places where crime is not out of control

That doesn't mean he's all goodness and light. His gang is heavily armed and defend their turf from other gangs fircely. Illegal drugs are kept out, the pushers who try to work on Karns turf don't live long enough to realize their mistake. It's mentioned that a triad tried to run drugs through Karns territory, then tried to kill Karns. The result was that Karns gang wiped out the triad in question.

So, on the one hand, I have a character who was trying to do good, but on the other, was not someone you wanted to cross or have angry at you. Great.

But something happened. For some reason, Karns managed to insert himself into the story that occures before the one I had created him for. (I was writing three stories in the series at the same time, going from one to another when I had writer's block) Not only that, but he became an inportant part of the story line. A throw away line about him in the second story became the basis for an entire chapter in the first story that expanded on the people around Karns and why they were so sucessful. In short, he went from minor character to major on the strenght of his character.

Scary, no?  ;D

Craig

the neurovore of Zur-En-Aargh:
It depends on what the story is.

What comes to me first is usually either a story shape or a world.  So I often find myself doing the metaphorical equivalent of shouting into the darkness at the back of my head "OK, I've got a vacancy here, 1998 real-world setting, male, early 20s, nurturer, pretty much asexual, has to be someone who will respond to key event X this way in chapter 9 and behave this way in key scene Y in chapter 27. Any takers ?" Then when someone turns up who can fit that part, I start writing and learn about them as I go along - got a whole subplot out of that guy, largely to do with a couple of younger people assuming that because he was not noticably responding to women in a couple of situations where they assumed all straight men would, he must be gay rather than just someone with almost no sex drive; and there was his family background, and what he did with his life, and so on. Complications ensued.  On the other hand, I get people who come out of that darkness and don't fit any current projects and just sort of mill around, more or less well-behaved.

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