Post by Lady Hammer on Oct 10, 2007 13:15:31 GMT -5
Making a Character You Love, by Lady Hammer
Some people have the unfortunate experience of never being able to love the characters they create, and for many people, this is the bane of their storylines. Because they can’t become attached to their characters, their projects suffer and can never be finished.
“But Lady, how can I make a character that I truly like?”
It’s not a simple task, I can assure you that. Making a character should be a hard task that is almost like having a child of your own. A little piece of you should be inside every character to ensure that you won’t abandon it. But how can you put a little piece of you inside an idea and 1) keep from having every character be the same, and 2) keep from having a character exactly like yourself? We are complex beings that have many dimensions, especially as writers, so the first step is finding all of those personality aspects.
What makes you? What are your bad traits? What are your good ones? If you took a small quirk of yours and made it into a huge part of another character, what would happen? Get a piece of paper, quick, and start to make a list. What composes you?
I am very emotional. I also have a heated temper, but I know how to keep a lid on it until I boil over at the very end. Then, I explode, and everyone gets a piece of how wronged I was. I’m also very creative, and enjoy teaching others because I learn from it. I’m extremely extroverted and bold, and feel like everyone is entitled to hear about my daily life and my innermost secrets. I appreciate the different flavors of different foods and I consider it an experience to taste them, and I believe that not everything needs seasoning. I love to pamper someone I love, and I love to be pampered. I don’t have to live in luxury to be happy, although it would be nice. As long as I have my loved one snuggled up right next to me, I’m in good spirits. I believe in fantastical things, but I’m not stupid about them, i.e. I’m not one of those girls who thinks that she’ll get bit by her vampire boyfriend. I believe in mental and astral shifters, I believe that dragons, faeries, etc., all live in a different realm that is accessible to us once we learn how to get there, and I am a polytheist and a monotheist at the same time. Spirit resides in each and every one of us, and in everything we see, hear, feel, touch, and taste. However, to make it easier on us, we sometimes put different faces on Spirit to help us worship some of the different things that it represents. And I love cats.
I could have much, much easily made the list longer. It’s a good idea to bullet the list and to make it as long as humanly possible, so that you won’t be running out of ideas anytime soon. If you want, you can give the list separate parts based on… oh, I don’t know, different moods or different sides of yourself. Like the side with all the bad emotions, the side with all the good emotions, the secretive side, the healing side, the guarding side, etc. Give yourself as many options as you can, because those different “sides” can be made into characters, too. That’s how Tizzy was created.
Once your list is finally completed, it’s time to take another sheet of paper or two, and make a list of appearance traits. List things for eyes, hair, body type, face, and anything else you can think of. Under eyes, maybe put “beryl green eyes as lucid as Jealousy itself”. For hair, maybe “locks as wavy and unpredictable as the sea”, and “like strands of fire”. Body type might consist of things such as “tall as a tower, and solid as one, too”, and for faces, “a perfectly round, almost pudgy face with a tiny pointed chin and a button nose”. If you need ideas but don’t have any, try a generator site, like seventhsanctum.com. You’ll find all kinds of stuff there, from name generators to race generators to spell generators and more. The appearance chart is very important, and don’t forget to include as many metaphors, similes, personification, and allusions in there as you can, because without them, they’re just flat descriptions. There’s no depth or personality to them, no inspiration, no heart, no anything! And you’ll need plenty of those things for the next step.
What inspires you? What makes your skin tingle with ideas? Maybe a movie with really good graphics? Or beautiful artwork of scenery? Maybe music? It has to be something that gives you goosebumps, it’s so marvelous. Make a list of those too. Mine would consist of the Resident Evil movies, the game Fatal Frame, Mega Man midis, listening to a thunderstorm, certain artwork on deviantART, t.A.T.u., Linkin Park, Seether, Evanescence, Breaking Benjamin, exquisitely prepared food that sits delicately on my tongue and tastes great, and fascinating imagery. The list can be made longer, yes, but I’m not making it longer. You are! Because you’re going to get those goosebumps on your skin and raise that power and blow life into an idea.
Sometimes when you’re making characters, they come with plots. Sometimes when you’re making plots, they come with characters. Whatever the situation for you, find that niche for creating your heroes and villains. Are you starting completely from scratch, or do you already have an idea? Find a status, start doing whatever it is that will get those tingles running down your body, and look over your lists.
Maybe the first thing that catches your eye is that “secretive” side of yourself. Those tingles of awe need to be channeled immediately into that idea. Form an image in your head, the image that whatever you’re listening to, watching, tasting, etc., gives you. Is it a woman in a tight red dress with Marilyn Monroe curls and a dagger tied to her leg? Is it a man in a leather trench coat with long hair shining in the moonlight as he scours the streets in silence? Do you see a teenaged girl sitting in the darkness of her room eating berries? Whatever you see is a great start. If you don’t see anything, that’s okay. Keep trying. Those lists will catch your attention eventually. Maybe the beryl-green eyes of Jealousy belong to a widow who lives in a lighthouse and stares at ships as they pass by into the harbor. Maybe the waves of hair like the unruly sea belong to a man who conducts a classical orchestra.
You see, everything is an idea, it just needs life. Most cases where characters are abandoned by their writers are caused by the lack of life blown into them. You are alive, the people around you are alive, so why not take pieces of you or them and put them inside these ideas? I suggested using yourself first because, since you are you, essentially, it should be easier to work with. But anything is possible. Something as simple as a name can give way to an entire character, but it still needs life blown into it. That tingle that runs up and down you when you’re in awe is called “raising power” when you put it to use. So use it! Once you have the skeleton of your character, give it more depth. Make it like a real person. Give it a place to live, give it likes and dislikes, give it a goal, give it ambitions, give it good personality traits and bad personality traits. Use things from your list to give it interesting quirks that you can relate to!
We are writers. We have to make characters that everyone else can believe are alive, too. The first step is making ourselves believe. Without life, there is only death, and without life, there can be no circle, no story, no series, no anything. Just a dismal character who wants to be alive but was never given that spark.
So get to it! Feel free to show me your lists, too!
Some people have the unfortunate experience of never being able to love the characters they create, and for many people, this is the bane of their storylines. Because they can’t become attached to their characters, their projects suffer and can never be finished.
“But Lady, how can I make a character that I truly like?”
It’s not a simple task, I can assure you that. Making a character should be a hard task that is almost like having a child of your own. A little piece of you should be inside every character to ensure that you won’t abandon it. But how can you put a little piece of you inside an idea and 1) keep from having every character be the same, and 2) keep from having a character exactly like yourself? We are complex beings that have many dimensions, especially as writers, so the first step is finding all of those personality aspects.
What makes you? What are your bad traits? What are your good ones? If you took a small quirk of yours and made it into a huge part of another character, what would happen? Get a piece of paper, quick, and start to make a list. What composes you?
I am very emotional. I also have a heated temper, but I know how to keep a lid on it until I boil over at the very end. Then, I explode, and everyone gets a piece of how wronged I was. I’m also very creative, and enjoy teaching others because I learn from it. I’m extremely extroverted and bold, and feel like everyone is entitled to hear about my daily life and my innermost secrets. I appreciate the different flavors of different foods and I consider it an experience to taste them, and I believe that not everything needs seasoning. I love to pamper someone I love, and I love to be pampered. I don’t have to live in luxury to be happy, although it would be nice. As long as I have my loved one snuggled up right next to me, I’m in good spirits. I believe in fantastical things, but I’m not stupid about them, i.e. I’m not one of those girls who thinks that she’ll get bit by her vampire boyfriend. I believe in mental and astral shifters, I believe that dragons, faeries, etc., all live in a different realm that is accessible to us once we learn how to get there, and I am a polytheist and a monotheist at the same time. Spirit resides in each and every one of us, and in everything we see, hear, feel, touch, and taste. However, to make it easier on us, we sometimes put different faces on Spirit to help us worship some of the different things that it represents. And I love cats.
I could have much, much easily made the list longer. It’s a good idea to bullet the list and to make it as long as humanly possible, so that you won’t be running out of ideas anytime soon. If you want, you can give the list separate parts based on… oh, I don’t know, different moods or different sides of yourself. Like the side with all the bad emotions, the side with all the good emotions, the secretive side, the healing side, the guarding side, etc. Give yourself as many options as you can, because those different “sides” can be made into characters, too. That’s how Tizzy was created.
Once your list is finally completed, it’s time to take another sheet of paper or two, and make a list of appearance traits. List things for eyes, hair, body type, face, and anything else you can think of. Under eyes, maybe put “beryl green eyes as lucid as Jealousy itself”. For hair, maybe “locks as wavy and unpredictable as the sea”, and “like strands of fire”. Body type might consist of things such as “tall as a tower, and solid as one, too”, and for faces, “a perfectly round, almost pudgy face with a tiny pointed chin and a button nose”. If you need ideas but don’t have any, try a generator site, like seventhsanctum.com. You’ll find all kinds of stuff there, from name generators to race generators to spell generators and more. The appearance chart is very important, and don’t forget to include as many metaphors, similes, personification, and allusions in there as you can, because without them, they’re just flat descriptions. There’s no depth or personality to them, no inspiration, no heart, no anything! And you’ll need plenty of those things for the next step.
What inspires you? What makes your skin tingle with ideas? Maybe a movie with really good graphics? Or beautiful artwork of scenery? Maybe music? It has to be something that gives you goosebumps, it’s so marvelous. Make a list of those too. Mine would consist of the Resident Evil movies, the game Fatal Frame, Mega Man midis, listening to a thunderstorm, certain artwork on deviantART, t.A.T.u., Linkin Park, Seether, Evanescence, Breaking Benjamin, exquisitely prepared food that sits delicately on my tongue and tastes great, and fascinating imagery. The list can be made longer, yes, but I’m not making it longer. You are! Because you’re going to get those goosebumps on your skin and raise that power and blow life into an idea.
Sometimes when you’re making characters, they come with plots. Sometimes when you’re making plots, they come with characters. Whatever the situation for you, find that niche for creating your heroes and villains. Are you starting completely from scratch, or do you already have an idea? Find a status, start doing whatever it is that will get those tingles running down your body, and look over your lists.
Maybe the first thing that catches your eye is that “secretive” side of yourself. Those tingles of awe need to be channeled immediately into that idea. Form an image in your head, the image that whatever you’re listening to, watching, tasting, etc., gives you. Is it a woman in a tight red dress with Marilyn Monroe curls and a dagger tied to her leg? Is it a man in a leather trench coat with long hair shining in the moonlight as he scours the streets in silence? Do you see a teenaged girl sitting in the darkness of her room eating berries? Whatever you see is a great start. If you don’t see anything, that’s okay. Keep trying. Those lists will catch your attention eventually. Maybe the beryl-green eyes of Jealousy belong to a widow who lives in a lighthouse and stares at ships as they pass by into the harbor. Maybe the waves of hair like the unruly sea belong to a man who conducts a classical orchestra.
You see, everything is an idea, it just needs life. Most cases where characters are abandoned by their writers are caused by the lack of life blown into them. You are alive, the people around you are alive, so why not take pieces of you or them and put them inside these ideas? I suggested using yourself first because, since you are you, essentially, it should be easier to work with. But anything is possible. Something as simple as a name can give way to an entire character, but it still needs life blown into it. That tingle that runs up and down you when you’re in awe is called “raising power” when you put it to use. So use it! Once you have the skeleton of your character, give it more depth. Make it like a real person. Give it a place to live, give it likes and dislikes, give it a goal, give it ambitions, give it good personality traits and bad personality traits. Use things from your list to give it interesting quirks that you can relate to!
We are writers. We have to make characters that everyone else can believe are alive, too. The first step is making ourselves believe. Without life, there is only death, and without life, there can be no circle, no story, no series, no anything. Just a dismal character who wants to be alive but was never given that spark.
So get to it! Feel free to show me your lists, too!
