One of the hardest things I have heard writers talk about is the creation of characters. Sometimes it can be difficult, but there are many ways to build a good character for your story.
One of my favorite things about being a writer is that, before this, I was an actress. Being an actress helped me understand my characters even better, and this experience helps me today as a writer.
Characters are a fundamental part of creating a story and bringing it to life. It is important to study and analyze each character and create a “diary” or “biography” for each one in order to gain a clearer understanding of who they were and who they are today. We need to define every detail, from the most basic, such as favorite color, zodiac sign, or favorite music, to the deeper aspects: fears, phobias, childhood experiences, and more.
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Personally speaking, I don’t go into this much detail for my characters, but only the ones which are germane to the story. Things like Zodiac signs are totally superfluous in the worlds I create.
Geoff Hall That's perfect Geoff!. This was just an example, but the important thing is to do the process of knowing your character.
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Florencia Provost hi Florencia, for that is part of the process, but another part is listening to what the character tells us, what they want to do, or say, or do.
My attitude is to find out what the character has to do, and then use this to determine the personality. In practice the character should often have a personality which is more or less the opposite of what one expects from a person in that position.
Florencia Provost I like the idea of developing fears, phobias and childhood experiences. Thanks for the post!
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You certainly don't need to dwell on favorite colors, music, and other superficialities. This is hacky navel-gazing and campy vanity over sanity. No prodco wants to pay a writer to play around doing that.
What absolutely matters is every character's perspective on the story's core theme. That's where the real meat is. That's what makes them fundamentally different as people and fuels life-affirming conflict. Good writers start there and work their way outward.
At the end of the day, you can have two characters that like and do exactly the same things, but have completely contrasting views on fundamental aspects of life. That's actually more impactful on the reader/viewer who's a lot less likely to see it coming.
Having a character enter dressed in black and carrying a thrift store Smiths vinyl in a hemp bag is just another form of exposition, unless it's being lined up to be subverted.
When building characters, the place to start is with the soul, not the photoshoot.