Character inspirations

How do you conceive and flesh out new characters? *

Have you encountered characters in other works who demand to be modified and written into another setting? Do you design them to fill plot roles, or base the plot on the characters, or both, or neither? When they fill plot roles, how do you make them distinct? When the characters come first, how do you keep the plot from turning into either a vignette or a Thirty Gambit Pile-Up?

Almost all of my characters originate as expies somehow and then develop away from the mould as I write them and rethink them. Several of them are fascinating enough that I feel compelled to write them when I don't have an appropriate story for them to involve themselves in.

The Revolution Will Not Be Tropeable

Sometimes I just come up with random ideas and do something with it.

Other times I look at a character from X work and say "oo, what if they were in one of my stories, with this, this, this, this, this... different about them?"

"Shit, our candidate is a psychopath. Better replace him with Newt Gingrich."

I write with a similar method, taking existing character's traits and modifying them per the backstory established for my world. My main, Yuki, is basically a mix of pre-timeskip Sasuke Uchiha and Setsuna Sakurazaki.

Basically, I take what works as a character, and slowly flesh them out into a person (Or try to anyways. That's the theory). Eventually, they wind up more human than a mass of characteristics and it all works out in the end. Haven't quite figured out how to pull off some Uncanny Valley-type characters yet, but I'll blame that on a lack of writing practice.

No one believes me when I say angels can turn their panties into guns.

What I tend to do is write short stories or scenes with them even if it isn't part of the main storyline. It helps me get ahold of their personality and how they would interact with the other characters.

As for your plot-pileup problem, I'm not sure - I'm not very nice about letting my characters get their way.
Also why is that a problem? :P

EDIT: As for inspirations, 4 of my characters came from the personalities my sister and I gave some video game characters while we were playing.

edited 26th Jan '12 4:38:06 PM by StolenByFaeries

"You've got your transmission and your live wire, but your circuit's dead." - Media

I've always started by building characters around their core philosophies, though those can change as their role in the story and characterization develops. My resident Corrupt Corporate Executive, Sigmund, went from a relatively flat character representing free-market capitalism to one of Gatsby-like nihilistic despair. (Pardon my pretentious-sounding reference to School Study Media.)

And I let random traits accumulate and roll with them — I originally made Sigmund gay to avoid implying a squicky relationship with Alice, but since then it, and the understanding it's given him of what it's like to be seen as a freak, has been the source of many of his Pet the Dog moments that demonstrate he isn't just a greedy psychopath, but a human being trapped by fear of losing everything he's worked so hard to make even as he regrets the ways in which he made it.

This works as well. Silly little time-off skits can show a lot about a character.

Also, editted as per this suggestion

edited 26th Jan '12 3:48:07 PM by KillerClowns

Occasionally I run into a character type I like that can be transplanted. On roughly the same frequency I run into a character which can be Expied even if the Expy looks or resembles nothing like the original by the end. (This route is the origin of Colonel Barry Smith in my book. He's originally as in 10 years ago conceived as an Expy of Sergeant Major Johnson from Halo. He has since grown into a much different persona.)

"Allah may guide their bullets, but Jesus helps those who aim down the sights."

I usually start from a basic concept in my mind (an archetype, character trait, a bit of scene) and then brainstorm to branch off there.

Most of my characters start either by taking a trope I like and playing with it for a core, then fleshing out the character (providing them with backstory, motivation etc.). Other times I create characters based on a certain atmosphere I want to promote, thrn I flesh them out from their.

And my plots tend to develop around the characters.

I've got new mythological machinery, and very handsome supernatural scenery. Goodfae: a mafia web serial

My characters are agglomerations of all the ideas I have about them over the course of writing the story. I don't usually get a clear idea of what my characters are actually like until fairly late in the process; they tend to start out as placeholders with either zero or one defined trait, and kind of grow as I find myself thinking about what they actually do.

Shinigan (Naruto fanfic)

My characters begin as job descriptions- 'Apathetic Ukrainian fisherman in his forties', 'Timid bachelorette housekeeper', 'Mischievous pharmacologist siren', etc. Usually, those descriptions themselves come about as a result of a worldbuilding aspect that I want to showcase, and then they continue to branch off and accumulate traits from there in a Fridge Logic/Horror/Brilliance-like manner.

"Jack, you have debauched my sloth."

Start by wondering what sort of characters would grow up in the setting or time period I'm writing in, then if I came up with the plot before the characters, imagine the sort of protagonist that would suit the plot, then the sort of people he would associate with or become enemies with, and just continue to expand outwards.

to the last I grapple with thee; from hell’s heart I stab at thee; for hate’s sake I spit my last breath at thee

I usually start with characters from other works and transplant them into other scenarios. Then, I usually spend a year or two chewing on them in order to create a coherent backstory without plot holes and an interesting personality. Then I focus on other characters who previously only were there to play roles and start trying to picture why they did what they did. Which usually causes more plot holes. Which leads me to start chewing on the characters again. Eventually, it all becomes coherent, although it usually zigzags in directions I never anticipated. My main character for what I'm currently writing was supposed to be a sociopathic Villain Protagonist. Somewhere in the process of all the chewing, he turned into a sheltered Shrinking Violet. Complete 180, but I'm happy with it, and I guess that's what matters.

Honestly, it's different for each character - it'd be easier to list how I don't come up with them. Taking the characters I've used in the Character Development Threads as an example, a full explanation of how Qrlil evolved into her current form would likely take a couple of pages, whereas Jones and Violet originated as one-sentence descriptions that were slowly fleshed out.

I can say without question that the characters will always come before the plot, though, both in terms of when they're created and in terms of writing priority.

I draw inspiration from... a lot of things. Pre-existing characters, real people, some sentence I want to hear uttered, plot roles, some cool or funny picture I see on the Internet, awesome clothes, deadly weapons, delicious food, cultures, names...

Basically, if I find it interesting, I can make some sort of character out of it. I usually make a ton of characters, and I just get some from that bunch to insert into a particular story, modifying and revising as I deem necessary.

I draw inspiration from...well, everything, like Fillerdude. I especially draw inspiration from other characters in the books I read, and the people I see around me. Especially how they act, speak, etc. After that, I try and figure out what it is that they want, by observing the same sources.

edited 26th Jan '12 6:00:13 AM by punkreader

Four prime sources for my characters:

1. Archetypes

2. Characters from other works

3. People around me

4. RL people, both contemporary and historical

I'm a (socialist) professional writer serializing a WWII alternate history webnovel.

This is true for me as well.

Bite my shiny metal ass.

Little off-topic, but I'm confused by the reference to 'Gatsby-like nihilistic despair'. That just doesn't make sense to me - Gatsby's defining trait is his boundless hope.

Scepticism and doubt lead to study and investigation, and investigation is the beginning of wisdom. - Clarence Darrow

The book Gatsby. Not the character Gatsby.

Read my stories!

That makes more sense, although I never found the book particularly despairing myself. Incidentally, confusion could have been avoided with either the full title or the correct formatting of 'Gatsby-like nihilistic despair'.

Scepticism and doubt lead to study and investigation, and investigation is the beginning of wisdom. - Clarence Darrow

@ D Roy

Me too. I generally look at what I think has the best sense of aesthetic with the rest of the current book.

Sign on for this After The End Fantasy RP.

...how did you read The Great Gatsby and not feel depressed by the end?

"Shit, our candidate is a psychopath. Better replace him with Newt Gingrich."

It's depressing, yes, but the failure of Gatsby doesn't really seem to imply the same for everyone the way a work full of "nihilistic despair" would.

In retrospect, I've gotten a lot of personality from noticing that I'd unintentionally given characters patterns of behavior, then going back and writing in reasons for those patterns other than mere chance. (Say, if a character is frequently rude to authority, I'll make it part of his character that he resents other people having control over him.) I suppose this is an inefficient way to write, but it's worked decently enough so far.

That's Feo . . . He's a disgusting, mysoginistic, paedophilic asshat who moonlights as a shitty writer—Something Awful

Back when I was 11, I used to have one mission in mind when it came to making characters: "Make him cool!" Nowadays? Well, the basic mission is still "Make a cool character!" but I find myself asking "Okay, how?" more often than not.

Looking at the works of other writers/cool characters has helped. One guy that I have in mind has the mission "Be a hero!" Being a nerd, I pull from multiple media outlets and more or less fuse them together. So this hero is a mash-up of Ryu and Captain America — kind of a "best of both worlds" situation; taking the qualities of both and understanding what makes them both successful, while putting them in plenty of what-if situations in the context of my own works to develop them further.

It's one thing to have expies and such in a work, but it's another to run them through the gauntlet of whatever your mind can cook up. It certainly helps that my characters are unreasonably wacky in one form or another (a Power Rangers nut, an assassin who goes cuckoo for cabbage, a coyote-boy who's more or less God and an unrepentant Troll)...but that's to be expected when you play a few video games too many. And had your head bashed into the ground by a giant inflatable ball in P.E. class.

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