How Do You Create Characters?

Before you start putting a character in a story, do you completely come up with their backstory, nuances, motivations, and other stuff like that, or do you give them the traits you need for the part of the story you need them in, and let the backstory and stuff evolve naturally?

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I dunno. I draw them. That usually helps. They just kinda...come out.

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I start writing. *

edited 9th Feb '12 9:11:08 AM by EldritchBlueRose

Has ADD, plays World of Tanks, thinks up crazy ideas like children making spaceships for Hitler. Occasionally writes them down.

Role in the story has something to do with it. Somebody who's meant to live will have traits that help them survive, somebody who's not will have traits that can be used to explain their death. A leader will act like a leader, a soldier like a soldier, a cop will act like a cop. Extraneous details are allowed to fill themselves in as time goes by, in response to individual experiences.

Nous restons ici.

The first writing-related things I come up with, sometimes even before a proper premise or plot idea are characters and worldbuilding aspects. If a character comes first, they begin, as I've stated in other threads, as a sentence-long job description*

or a single quirk*

Maid obtained from in-universe servant trade

. The character grows, and plots spring forth from there.

"Jack, you have debauched my sloth."

According to this scrap of paper by my desk, it goes something like this:

Christina "Bruiser" (Bass) 16

Maurice (vocals) 18/19

Ross (drums) 15

I start with a "core trait", then I add a physical, a mental and a social trait (a la Sims3). I come up with examples of those traits for the background, then I let the rest fill itself in. Sometimes I include information on race and occupation, but only if they are inhuman.

edited 9th Feb '12 10:55:32 AM by nekomoon14

Level 3 Social Justice Necromancer. Chaotic Good.

Eh, it depends. If there's some inspiration at hand(something from media, music, real-life things), I usually tend to evolve it into some kind of character. I mean, I created two new female characters when I was messing around with Soul Calibur: Broken Destiny's Character Editor. At some point I thought "Hell, this looks promising"... And that's about it.

grah

Generally they start with, like, two personality traits. Then they evolve along with the story concept. By the time I actually write anything they're usually complex enough.

Shinigan (Naruto fanfic)

Role of the story comes first. I know that characters must meet someone, so I create a guy, and give him whatever traits come to my mind that fit him at that time. Or I know that I cannot fill 300 pages with three characters doing nothing, so I add a fourth character whose personality I think works well together with the others.

Or I just think "hmm, it'd be nice if a character like this were in there somewhere", so I add that character where I think is appropriate. But that's rather rare.

I do it in a lot of different ways.

It varies. Sometimes, I just write, add a throw-away character... and then... I can use that! Uhhhh... now to think about what they're really like.

Other times, it's a full D&D-style character roll-up with all the trimmings before I even think about opening Word with malice aforethought regarding plot.

<shrugs> Can't help beyond that.

I'm ashamed to admit that most of my characters start out as expies. My character Lyra is an expy of Maya Fey, Georgie is an expy of World, Cole is an expy of Satan, etc.

Other characters are based on (usually negative) personality traits of mine.

It depends on what I'm making them for. Role play characters tend to me more "I think this would be cool, let's build off of it" while characters in my stories tend to be more "Okay we need a person with this power and to do this." I'm not saying all my characters in my stories are made for plot reasons. Most of them are just revamped RP characters or even revamped fan characters.

Why would you have a revamped RP character anyways?

Personally, I try to spend time outlining my character, writing down silly details about them that aren't relevant to the story itself, but might be to me from a narrator's perspective, and building them from ground up. You can't write a story until your characters are established, so I do that before anything else. The other thing is, if I've mentioned something about a character like, say they are Indian in origin, I try to bring out that aspect in a way relevant to the narrative.

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I throw a list of tropes at a wall and see what sticks where.

In all seriousness, I think of what kind of role/niche the character will fill and what that will require of them. Then I build a personality around that using goals and aspirations that would reasonably fit with that role, and round out the rest with little humanizing details like hobbies and favorite things (even though such things likely won't have too much of an effect on the story, if they make it in at all).

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Presumably, if they were interesting enough to deserve an entire work.

Is such a thing likely? I'm not very familiar with the whole concept of R Ps, but they seem awfully reductionist to me, in terms of characterisation.

Currently cursing my way through Radiant Dawn Hard Mode. Give it a look!

I don't know that much about them either. The Character Development Threads, which I'm closely involved with, are (at least in theory) meant to be Exactly What It Says on the Tin, and I'd have no problem reusing a character I created specifically for one of them - or at least one of the more recent ones - in an actual work. On the other hand, the stereotypical action-focused forum RP? Not so much, though I don't know how much basis that stereotype has in reality.

Reductionism only shows in an RP character if you're willing to write them in that sort of manner; the same goes for novel and literary characters. There's really not much fundamental difference.

edited 9th Feb '12 7:43:48 PM by CrystalGlacia

"Jack, you have debauched my sloth."

I usually create RP characters like I do with novel characters, except the process is more spontaneous.

There are many ways I create a character. Sometimes, they start an idea, an image. For example, Finn spawns out of an image of "a bandaged, timid teen" or Ian/Eon as a modern-era vampire. Justin was made from the idea of someone being the anti-thesis of Light. Some characters even spawn from a tiny scene in my head.

Occasionally, I start with a role for a character (Amy being "the girlfriend" before taking another character's role as "the best friend"), but I more than often start with an image or an idea and brainstorm from there.

I usually come up with what is gonna drive them forward in the story. In my perspective, you want your characters to always have something to continue going for.

Generally, I'll come up with an idea - a personality trait, an ability, an appearance - and build from there. I don't typically narrow down every detail about the character - I like to be surprised once in a while. Hell, sometimes I don't even know the character's religious background before going in. I've had two characters turn out to have Jewish backgrounds (one only half-Jewish), though they're both basically atheists.

So, yeah, I like to leave plenty of details to figure out during the writing, once I've got a better handle on them.

X-Men X-Pert, my blog where I talk about X-Men comics.

I'll admit that my characters can start out pretty flat—"the coward," "the fanatic," etc. I figure out much of their natures by writing them and seeing what they do, turning small lapses into major flaws and small successes into underlying virtues.

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edited 21st Jun '17 5:15:49 AM by ArlaGrey