How Do You Create Characters?

[yowser]

It's like seeding clouds for rain.

The characters don't come out of nowhere. An old college friend and I used to sit on the library's steps between classes, watching the parade of people going by. He'd pick out someone we didn't (or barely) know well and make up a story about them. 'See how there's a hitch to his walk? That's because he had a bad encounter with a great Dane when he was ten, on the way to his grandfather's still in the mountains of West Virginia...' on and on. He could develop backstory more than anyone I ever knew, and it was fascinating to see him do it. Watching and noticing are huge parts of the deal. Small makes big.

For me a lot depends on the story origin, whether it starts with a cloud-person who needs a story, or a story that requires a cloud-person. But it all starts small. Sometimes the story is a drizzle, sometimes a monsoon. Highly variable.

 

[SimonDoom]

There's no one method.

Sometimes I base characters loosely on real people, where they've given permission for me to do so. In those cases I start with the character, and then figure out what I want them to do. Most of the time I start with a plot/story idea, and I create characters that I think will play out that idea well.

Generally speaking, I think of myself as more of a "plot first" author, but I believe in a good story the relationship between plot and character should be such that the plot is made more believable by seeming to arise organically from the character.

I write short stories, and in a short story you don't have to overdo it with character backstory. Just come up with a few character traits that give the character some interest, perhaps some internal conflict, and a motive that makes the story make sense.

 

[TarnishedPenny]

I will initially have a scene in mind, sometimes two, and a general theme. From that falls at least the main character and maybe a minor one or two. Next, keeping it general, to fit the theme, what kind of people do they have to be in terms of appearance and character?

What I now have are just a few notes, nothing detailed. Let’s say I’m planning the protagonist to be a brash, confident, outgoing blonde. I’ll do a net search for images, in this case, BLONDE + BRASH + CONFIDENT. I’ll run through dozens, maybe hundreds of images until I find one which fits the bill. I download it, then ?maybe one or two more.

I suppose it’s silly to say you can tell a person’s character from their appearance, but I’ll set that aside and think on the images of those three women and try to imagine what they’re like IRL and consider how well they’ll fit the rôle. One of them generally does and I now have an image of my character.

I won’t say it’ll work for everybody, but it has suited my purposes well enough.

 

[KeithD]

I'm of the school that says every story is the story of a character's growth and change.

I'm not from that school. And I posit that a completely legitimate and plausible story ending is showing that, despite all, the character hasn't grown or changed from the experience. This is real life.

 

[AG31]

Where do you generally draw up inspiration from? What's your process like for coming up with characters? What is your relationship to them and to this process in general? I'm interested to hear about how other writers do this, as I'm opening myself up to new methods.

Feel free to also talk about how character development arises naturally in your writing (or if you have to force it), etc.

Since I wrtie "simple erotica," that is little focus on character or plot, not much goes into coming up with characters. In fact, nothing goes into it. The fantasy on which the story is based arises full blown in my mind, complete with good looking, well built, self aware, self accepting MMC. (I don't have FMCs.) During the actual writing I fine tune details, but not much, if at all, about the MC.

I do, however, much appreciate really well developed characters. I just finished the Steven King Mercedes trilogy and marvelled at how much pleasure I got out of spending time with his characters, even when one of the books veered into the para normal, which I really don't like.

 

[AG31]

My writing emphasizes plot. I bring characters in to serve the plot and the plot provides me what needs to be in included (and nothing else) in the characters. Ipso facto I do not make up character charts before writing. I'll only note elements of the characters to ensure I don't go out of their bounds as the story proceeds.

I found your (Habu's) detective Hardesty pretty vivid. But, yes, you describe your writing well, and it works.

 

[intim8]

This is real life.

I can't even.... that might be the worst thing I've ever heard a writer say.

 

[AG31]

If I did write character focussed stories, I'm pretty sure I would base them on collected observations in my past of idiosyncracies people display. I would have kept a note book (see Stuff from an Author's notebook). I would have taken pleasure in creating characters with lots of real life detail.

 

[Kumquatqueen]

0

I can't even.... that might be the worst thing I've ever heard a writer say.

Why? Some stories are simply relating some stuff that (might have) happened. The characters don't need to change.

Other stories are about the characters and how they grow, but not all, by any means.

 

[KeithD]

I can't even.... that might be the worst thing I've ever heard a writer say.

Why? Failure to change is a plausible ending--because it's a real life possibility and there's no reason why a reader shouldn't be reminded it can be. Why do you think it's the worse thing you've ever heard a writer to say?

 

[SimonDoom]

I'm not from that school. And I posit that a completely legitimate and plausible story ending is showing that, despite all, the character hasn't grown or changed from the experience. This is real life.

It's not a universal rule. It's a nice rule of thumb to use in many stories. I personally find it a useful way to think in writing stories. But there are plenty of successful stories where the character experiences no growth. James Bond never grows. Part of his appeal (in the books I've read) is that he's an implacable, unchangeable character. He might fall for a woman and soften for a little while (as in Casino Royale) but by the end of the book she's probably dead and he's right back where he started.

Jack Reacher books are the same way. In the Agatha Christie books I've read, Hercule Poirot shows no growth or change at all.

 

[Bazzle]

What colour panties is she wearing or not. Has she bothered with a bra, then potentially what colour hair she has.

 

[AG31]

It's not a universal rule. It's a nice rule of thumb to use in many stories. I personally find it a useful way to think in writing stories. But there are plenty of successful stories where the character experiences no growth. James Bond never grows. Part of his appeal (in the books I've read) is that he's an implacable, unchangeable character. He might fall for a woman and soften for a little while (as in Casino Royale) but by the end of the book she's probably dead and he's right back where he started.

Jack Reacher books are the same way. In the Agatha Christie books I've read, Hercule Poirot shows no growth or change at all.

Excellent point.

 

[intim8]

because it's a real life possibility

I'm not sure I can articulate why I find it so appalling. Part of it is that real life is 99% mundane boredom. People don't want to read mundane, they want to read something that is extraordinary in some way, or that at least gives them something to think about.

Change in a character doesn't have to be a huge dramatic thing, it can be him just learning something, all the better if he learns something about himself and his relation to the world.

and there's no reason why a reader shouldn't be reminded it can be.

... and the implication that our job is to teach readers something like that rubs me the wrong way.

Why do you think it's the worse thing you've ever heard a writer to say?

It's just the opposite of everything I think writing is. And I say this from the POV of a reader of at least a novel a week for the last almost 50 years, not as somebody that watched a lot of YouTube videos on how to write.

Realism is fine, but just re-creating real life is... <shudder>. Erotica doesn't require hifalutin ideas, and having static characters can fly, but even there, readers don't want their own mundane sex life shown to them, they want something more.

But also, writing things that don't have any change or any meaning, something to ponder, a story about everyday life, it sounds beyond boring to write. It sounds soul-crushing.

(Note, there have been some very good novels that make a point of focusing on the mundanity of everyday life, but they do it for a larger purpose. American Psycho - the novel, not the moive - is one prominent example.)

 

[theWollstonecraftWoman]

For the most part, being I write interracial cuckold stories, the characters are cookie cutouts. Now, in my horror series the characters seemed to create themselves.

 

[intim8]

there are plenty of successful stories where the character experiences no growth. James Bond never grow0s.

"Successful" depends on your definition. They are very commercially successful. Artistically, meh. I've never read the novels, so I'm just going by the movies.

But hey, James Bond changes a lot. It seems like every few movies, he's a completely different person.

 

[ChuckWolf]

Recently, I've been looking at pictures of Vivica A. Fox, so in the back of my mind, I've been thinking about basing a character on her. Especially the image below.

 

[NoTalentHack]

It really depends on both the story and the character's role in the story. I'll give a concrete example, a story I'm about 3/4 of the way through and don't think will change any further.

Spoilers for a story I haven't published yet below:

[SPOILER]
It started with a very simple conceit: "Do a Loving Wives story around an event similar to the Hawaii nuclear missile scare from a few years ago." I kind of thought about how to approach it for a while; I wanted a scenario where it would make sense for a wife, one who loves her husband and is a reasonably decent person, if somewhat selfish, to blatantly cheat on her husband in front of him when the people involved thought they were all going to die within a couple of hours.

Because of the type of thing I like to write, that's the basis, but it's not what the story is about. It's actually "about" how people will change both as time goes by and as their circumstances change, but also about how they don't, and also about what's really important to the people involved.

The scenario I came up with is a group of college friends meeting for a semi-annual vacation at an isolated lake house belonging to the rich, charismatic guy that was sort of the leader of the group back when they were in college, who the wife had wanted to hook up with back then, but the two never got the chance. I hadn't decided exactly how many I wanted there at that point, so I fleshed out what I needed in the story first, in terms of utility pieces:

• The MMC
• His wife
• The guy she cheats with.
• Someone who can explain, as the shit goes down, what's happening from a more technical sense, i.e., "Here, reader, is why these people all believe they're about to die, beyond simply an emergency broadcast message."

Those are the four "necessary" pieces. But, because I wanted to make it a potential swap, thereby making the wife seem a little less cruel, I added the friend's fiancee, who he is in a ENM relationship with, taking me up to five.

Because the story is about how people react at the end, I wanted a couple of other "types" of characters. First, I wanted a guy who only really obeys the rules of society because of consequences in general, someone who's pure id. On the flip side, I wanted a couple who focus on each other and their family when shit goes down. That left me with eight people, a solid cutoff number. I added a ninth, the girlfriend-of-the-month for the pure-id guy, but she's only there for about five minutes; she doesn't even get a real name.

What I ended up with were fairly stock characters:

• Typical LW MMC
• The slightly selfish wife who's more attractive than the MMC
• Rich host
• Rich host's jock best friend/perpetual hanger-on (pure id guy)
• Rich host's prettier-than-MMC's-wife ENM fiancee who tries to seduce MMC
• Nerdy woman whose wife couldn't make the gathering and is frustrated about it (the "here's why we're doomed" character)
• Midwestern high school sweethearts who stayed together for fifteen years who have two kids at home

Then I looked at them and went, "Wow, these are really fucking stock," and I changed something about almost all of them. In some cases, it was their relationships: adding some tension between the jock and the rich host's fiancee made certain aspects of the way the jock acts later in the story more believable, for example.

Some of it was who the characters were; the high school sweethearts were still that, but I added the detail that they had fairly recently started swinging to keep their marriage fresh, and the amoral ENM fiancee turns out to really take the whole "E" part of ENM seriously. Finally, the nerdy woman goes from being the sort of infodump character to playing a major role in the story, first as the MMC's confidante and later his love interest, and also adding another dimension to the theme of "what do you do at the end" with her own reaction to the events.

Part of this happened in the planning stage, but since I'm a pantser, most of it happened during the writing stage. At first, the changes were either in service to the plot or to keep the setup from being rote, but later, because the characters' personalities or relationships wouldn't work correctly with the plot as designed; when that happened, sometimes I changed the characters, but, as they became more "real," I started to change the plot instead. The broad strokes are still the same, but it's a better story, I think, for the changes that I made, none of which would have happened if I hadn't thought hard about how each character would react to the events and whether the reactions rang true.
[/SPOILER]

 

[intim8]

Jack Reacher books are the same way. I

In the streaming series, he actually does have some character growth. It's fairly minor, but it is there.

 

[AG31]

I'm not sure I can articulate why I find it so appalling.

Did you see @SimonDoom's reply about James Bond and Jack Reacher and Agatha Christie??

 

[KeithD]

I'm not sure I can articulate why I find it so appalling. Part of it is that real life is 99% mundane boredom. People don't want to read mundane, they want to read something that is extraordinary in some way, or that at least gives them something to think about.

You make this determination with no knowledge or reference to how the story unfolded to reach this point?

It sounds like maybe you are someone contained in a small world of the limited formula.

 

[intim8]

A note on my replies to Keith, I'm not claiming my published stories are shining examples of the principle. I'm only saying that it is a principle that I hold. I hold it less firmly here, more so in my mainstream stories.

 

[AG31]

someone contained in a small world of the limited formula.

Did you just make this up?

 

[intim8]

You make this determination with no knowledge or reference to how the story unfolded to reach this point?

I honestly don't understand the question. Can you elaborate?

 

[intim8]

Did you see @SimonDoom's reply about James Bond and Jack Reacher and Agatha Christie??

I did. I responded to it above. Our posts might have crossed in the mail.