My Tips For Writing

Character Development

This topic was requested by AmethystWolfSC. Hope this will help you.

Since I do not own this article, all author's notes will be in bold, while the article will be in the normal font.

As you begin writing a work of fiction-whether it be a short story or a novel, though you may not know yet what shape your piece will take-you might think of yourself as a director of a play. You will cast characters, dress them up, set them down somewhere, and push them into motion. They might collide with each other, or they might avoid each other-it's up to you. They will each have their own unique appearance. Barring, of course, writing about identical twins, and even then, there will likely be distinctions.

Your characters will each have their own set of values and beliefs. On top of that, they will have wants and needs. You'll have to sort all this out, help some of them gain their wants while thwarting others, until you reach some form of resolution.

But before you can do all this, you'll need to create characters.

~*~*~*~

Imagine you sit down to interview your character. You know nothing about them going into the interview, or maybe you can picture them, but you're not sure what they're like. You'll want to ask your character a long list of questions to get started.

I'm going to do this interview with my character, Janet, from Life.

Some questions to ask may include:

•How does the character feel about their parents?

Janet loves her parents very much, but they sometimes annoy her, since she is a teenager and needs her space.

•Does the character have any siblings?

No, Janet doesn't have any siblings.

•How does the character feel about their siblings?

As I said before, Janet doesn't have any siblings.

•How does the character feel about their job?

Janet is a teenager. She doesn't have a job. But she dreams of being an artist.

•Does the character have good posture?

She does, but she loves to read, so she might sometimes be seen reading in a curved position.

•Does the character make direct eye contact?

Janet is shy, so she doesn't always make direct eye contact. But if she knows the person well, she will make direct eye contact.

•Does the character have any nervous tics?

No. Although when disbelieving, she raises her left eyebrow.

•Does the character have a significant other?

She prefers being alone with her nose in a book.

•What sort of person is the character attracted to?

A person who will defend her no matter what; that is brave and not afraid to stand out. Basically the opposite of herself. But Janet is brave, there's no denying that.

•Does the character appear confident?

Janet is confident, but doesn't like to show it. She's independent.

•Is the character physically healthy?

Yes, she is physically healthy.

•Does the character have any medical conditions?

Janet has breathing problems.

•Has the character suffered any trauma in their past?

Her dearest aunt died, and she was strongly impacted by it.

•Has the character ever broken any laws?

I can't say. It'll ruin the story.

If you can answer all these questions about your character, you'll have a great deal of material.  You may find that you can use a lot of it, which is great.  However, not everything you determine about a character will go into your story.  "Obviously, you would never include the pages of information you have recorded about a character in this way, but your knowing the information...will make the character more developed in the story simply because you, the creator, know the character so well" (Knorr and Schell 166).  In other words, you don't have to include every single detail about your character's history in the story.  The best stories often allude to the past without being explicit about past events.

I hope this has helped you all. Thanks AmethystWolfSC for suggesting this topic! I'm open to more suggestions!

This article does not belong to me; I took it from the website https://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/998/01/