What a ride it is to create conflicting characters! The hardest part is making sure their goals, motivation, and conflict are enough to see the story to the end.
I’ve always been drawn to characterization and personality profiles, so that’s an intriguing part of writing for me. What do you think? Are you character-driven, or plot-driven?
Hands down, my favorite part of writing is creating the characters. I research who they are, build collages for them, and ask them extensive interviews about subjects that will never get put into the book. I’d like to say I get to know my characters pretty well. I love to explore their personalities and psychological makeup.
However, it’s also one of the hardest parts of writing. Creating a character who isn’t a cliché, a cardboard cutout, who acts and reacts the same on every page but is different than everybody else. Their emotions and writing those emotions offer a huge challenge to many writers, especially when you can’t get out of your own mind. A character is happy and they smile, but that gets very old very fast, and we as readers want to know why they are happy and how they are feeling to show us they are happy, or any myriad of emotions they feel throughout the story. This is where Show Don’t Tell is a huge factor.
Backstory and a character’s background is also important and fun creating, but writers have to be careful not to reveal too much too soon, or even reveal things that aren’t necessary to the story. Does it really matter that Winona prefers green leaf lettuce over romaine?
Each character will act and react differently, even the same character on different days. We all do. But there are personalities intrinsic only to us that writers must carve into their characters to make them shine.
I love to create character sketches to keep front and center when developing my story. Sometimes the characters change, since their backstory is the first thing I create before I know anything else. And they are always telling me secrets. But, as messy as it might seem here’s an idea of what I like to do!
And now for a little bit of fun. I’m picking up another round of Wednesday Relationship Advice. Every hump day, I am going to share a character sketch of individual characters and a piece of their relationship advice.
And since Dark Ride releases Tuesday, our first character sketch will be Zan. So come back Wednesday for more about Zan and his relationship advice!