Writing help

How to develop a character

Once you have an idea for a character, you can start developing the character by imagining more aspects of this person and his or her life.
Here's a questionnaire that you can use to create character profiles. Feel free to change any of the questions or add new ones:
- What's the character's occupation?
- What's the character's family like?
- Is the character in a relationship? What's his or her partner like?
- What is the character's home like? His or her neighborhood?
- Does your character have hobbies? What does he or she enjoy doing?
- What are your character's greatest strengths?
- What are his or her greatest weaknesses?
- What is his/her deepest desire?
- What is his/her greatest fear?
- What is something this character desperately wants to change about himself or herself?
- What is something this character doesn't know about himself or herself?
Most of this information will not actually go into your stories, but it will help you to flesh out the characters in your own mind so that you can write about them in a convincing way.
Your answers to these questions can also become an endless source of story ideas. I will show you how that works later on
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Homework
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1) Start your Idea Journal. This is simply a place where you save your creative writing ideas so that you can come back to them later. Your Idea Journal doesn't have to be in any special format. It might simply be a file on your computer, or you might prefer to use a blank book or notebook. If you're already keeping a writer's journal, you can do the Idea Journal exercises there.
2) Try at least *two* of the five methods we've discussed to get character ideas for your Idea Journal. Come up with ideas for at least *three* characters. Use the Character Questionnaire to write character profiles for all three of these characters.