Vanilla 1.1.8 is a product of Lussumo. More Information: Documentation, Community Support.
Describing the plot and asking myself what sort of person would do these things.
Plot and character are two sides of the same coin.
I only write out the most basic info, such as name, family, place and date of birth, occupation, and in the case of main characters, an abbreviated, unbiased life story. Everything else I keep in my head because I’m always revising it. It’s a good memory exercise, at least. Though at times it becomes sort of hard to coordinate lots of seperate sections of information with eachother so there aren’t any weird holes.
My problem is that when I try to fill out these things, so few of them actually apply, at least not for some of the characters I’m trying to write about write now. I don’t even know if she has a favorite color… she’s not really the sort of person who cares about trivial things like that. (“trivial” in this case being anything not directly related with how to kill people and save the world)
But the questions about their views are pretty useful, and you don’t usually see them in “character sheets”. I shall steal them from you. ;)
Huh, is it any reflection on my own personality that my character’s reaction to most of the “how they deal with X” questions is “kill things”?
sure why not
I just come up with random situations and try to figure out what the character would do. It helps me see their motivations and personalities more clearly, which make it easier to figure out what they would do, which in turn strengthens my perceptions of them. It’s a wonderful cycle.
Bastard is right, plot and character are the same thing. Your charater is defined by the choices he makes, this is how he reveals who he is. In a well designed story your character will be put in crisis and be forced to make true-character revealing decisions. To flesh out my characters I simply place them in my story arch. Only after you have structure should you add the details.
I have an article in the works about the concept of character, which might help clear up some misconceptions people have about writing characters. It’s certainly a tricky issue.
The problem with such lists, I find, isn’t just that so many of the points usually never come into play (unless your character is on the Bridge of Death and being asked what his or her favourite colour is), but that they can tend to be very, very restrictive, the same way plot outlines do. Stories and characters change in the telling, which is the whole “character development” gig. If you’re not careful, you might end up trying to feed a story an ending which doesn’t suit it, end up with static characters, so on and so forth.
The way I do it is I just write on ms word, with a separate document open, titled ‘storyX characters’. In it, I list every attribute of my character as I write and develop him or her. Sometimes, if I have a set idea of a character, or a couple of bits of trivia about him or her, I’ll enter that information in. It’s character development as I go along, and this way I can see if the characters aren’t rounded out enough, or if a few of them are too similar, and where I can correct them. It’s very good for character development.
Tamora Pierce uses a spreadsheet.
But seriously, I don’t like writing a ‘description’, because when you have to write a deepest fear or something, you just KNOW that your character is going to end up tackling it after it’s been written in. Which is okay for some things, but other times, it’s a) not what you wanted, pushing the story in a whole nother direction from what you had set out to do, and b) It’s just plain ANNOYING! ...Maybe I covered that.
For example, if you write that your character fears that her parents don’t really love her because she’s adopted, due to the inherant nature of stories (tying up all the loose ends is kinda status quo, if that’s the phrase I want), you will end up writing about this character meeting her parents or having some sort of heart-warming journey and psychological discussion. When what you really want to happen is that she’s involved in a bank robbery, and she has to get out alive and save her boyfriend from the gang who committed the robbery! Sometimes what your character now wants and what you want are just completely incongruous, all because you gave her an irrelevant fear to the story. Therefore, to make all sides of the character fit into the story (because we want rounded characters, don’t we? Repeat after me, rounded characters, rounded.), we have to include her deepest fear.
Whereas if you write the characters and the plot at the same time, you can include a more relevant fear. So my rule is- don’t sketch it in to your character profile if you don’t want that feature to become permanently linked in your mind with that character.
I don’t know whether you’d call this plot-driven or character-driven.
tl;dr lol
But seriously folks, why choose one way or the other? Why not think of a really wicked cool scene/bunch of scenes and think of what sort of decision the character is making, and once you do you realize the choices he has to make characterizes him? Then you realize what sort of person he has to be, and jump back and forth between plot and character, since all plot is is how the character develops and changes till he has the mother of all choices to make?
In reference to Steph’s post (which I did read, and thought it was very good, btw) and CB’s post, I agree that it’s difficult to pin down characteristics of a character before you actually start writing plots about them. There was a character that I had all nicely planned out, down to hair and eye color, favorite things, the whole nine yards. Then I started coming up with situations about her, only to discover she quickly developed two completely different personalities. I eventually split her into two characters, but if I’d left more leeway in at the beginning, I think I wouldn’t have run into that. Then again, I would never have discovered one of my favorite characters… so I suppose it’s a toss-up.
I’m a bastard so don’t get your hopes up.
Just leaving that out there for ya so you don’t hurt yourself.
@Steph – surprisingly, it did. It ended up being her and her sister and a subplot about family relationships. It worked out a lot better in practice than it sounds on paper. (on… screen? Whatever)
Cool.
Yeah, I guess that’s one way to go.
You could work the characters from the plot or the plot from the characters. If you have the characters down, then you can think of a situation and know what they’d do, which would make the plot progress in a smoother fashion, at least in my opinion.
Previously, I tried to go from plot to characters, but everything felt contrived, so I’m trying this way now instead.
Stephen King’s On Writing said that your stories should start plot driven and end character driven. Crude example:
Meteor hits the earth.
That’s the start of the story and is plot driven as there are no characters influencing the event. If you took all the characters out all together, this event would still happen. However, after the meteor hits, then your story should morph into character driven. Events occur and are dictated by what the characters in your story do and react to.
Of course a cardboard cutout of a character will, in fact, lead to plot driven. Take Eragon. Why does Galbatorix do anything? We have no real motivation or explanation for why he does what he does. Thus, Eragon’s story is in fact plot driven. (i.e. Why is Uncle Garrow killed? Because the plot demanded it.)
The line I usually mark as “why”. Take an event and ask why did it happen. If the answer is “just because” (note that really trite answers, “he’s evil”, “she’s crazy” fall under this) then the event is plot driven. If the answer is a little more elaborate (“because he needed the money for medicine”, “because she’s trying to escape her father”, etc) then you have a character driven plot.
Now how would you write the story of a character with a terminal illness?
There’s really no difference between the two, they’re two sides of the same coin.
No different from the meteor duh.
They are two very different things. Exhibit A: Eragon. Exhibit B: anything well written.
The advice sucks because all good stories make it so plot and character are inseperatable.
Even if you say “she does it because she is crazy” you have to answer the question of “why is she crazy in the first place” or hint at it to add depth, and that implies a basckstory or subplot.
Yes, GOOD stories.
Unfortunately 90% of everything is crap.
I’m just bumping this because it’s an awesome thread. Go, guys.
See, I have to have some idea of what I’m doing beforehand, or everything else just goes to the dogs. :P
Character sheets don’t work for me because my characters change too much. At least, the ones worth the effort of writing up characters sheet do.
Well, do you keep the general idea the same?
I don’t like using character sheets that demand me to think about the character’s favorite color or what kind of pet they’d like to have unless it’s important. But if it forces me to think about motivations and flaws and so on, then it’s useful for me.
I try not to flesh out my characters to great depth, either. When I’m writing their part in the story, it turns out that I had certain perceptions about their appearance/temperament/etc and I follow just that.
I agree with Rocky. It’s no point going into a character’s religion or sexual preference if it does not have any influence on the plot or the character, specially for minor characters.
Well, I like to know those kinds of things. I mean, for some reason, (taking a controversial example for some people) when I heard that Dumbledore was gay, even though it never turned up in any of the books, and wasn’t really important, per se, it felt right to me. And it might shed light on why someone does something the way they did.
In that case, I agree with you, Rocky- you never can tell what exactly will come up in writing, so knowing certain seemingly-insignificant things could come in handy later. Real people have little quirks or likes/dislikes that come up randomly- for example, they hate milk, etc. It might not have any bearing on the plot of your story, but having a few things like that help flesh out your character and give the impression that they’re somehow more than just the handful of MAJOR PLOT-RELATED TRAITS they have to have for the story.
Of course, you should never force those things into a story. They have to be something that naturally flows in the story, or otherwise it’s obvious that you’re trying to make them Well-Rounded Characters TM, and if the reader ever goes “Hm! This character has many traits and is very well-rounded!”, you’ve probably failed miserably in characterization. It’s supposed to be subtle.
I like to build a setting, create characters who make sense within that setting and then add small details as they become relevant.
I use a character sheet, but a) they’re hard to fill out, and b) I’ll probably go off of them. Thing is, I base my characters on real people (my female lead is like my sister, for example), and while it’s very easy to fill out a character sheet, it’s harder to say, “What would my character do in this situation?” I’m a very plot-driven person, and so making my characters fit the plot is very, very hard for me.
I skip all that background stuff and build firstly on what’s “plot-relevant” using Socratic questioning. I say a character, and give them some outrageous goal or method that pushes them into the plot.
I’ve got this woman, and she’s a hard-nose government official who created the system that’s taxing the people dry.
My first question is always “What possible motivation is there in that?” — Her state desperately needs the money because of problems that are no fault of their own. The official’s father was a revolutionary who won, but the old Evil regime had alot of skeletons the new regime can’t clean up. Everyone is suffering. She “had” to tax the countryside.
Aww, political excuses. How’d she develop this tax system? — The taxes are based off an old legend from this fantasy world, where the official’s people were once great nobles over the whole countryside and took care of the land and mountains. The weaker people loved them and gave them trusts. The modern tax system is meant to make the official’s people feel loved again….
I just made up most of that. I need someplace to save this. XD
Yeah, I see what you’re trying to do, Proserpina (yay, love the mythology name, by the way). I’ve been trying to develop more, plotwise and characterwise, using that kind of reasining method.
Mmm, yeah. I’ve been trying to deepen my backstory lately. It’s better than last time, at least!
(Oh god, that was a disaster)
Gonna drag out the Hemingway Iceberg Theory, since I like to apply it to everything. Seventh-eighths are underwater, but they’re still there, and it’s a good idea to know about the underwater part of your characters since that affects what you put on the page.
Well, do you keep the general idea the same?
Depends on what you mean by general idea. Physical appearances remain very fluid until I settle on something that feels “right.” Motivations may or may not change drastically depending on the character. Habits/quirks are constantly broken or formed. Basically, almost all my major characters wind up profoundly different from where they started (or not because they came full circle), so character sheets tend to hinder me more than help.
I usually have written down somewhere a basic history of the characters and their relationships with elaborations and anecdotes as needed, but aside from that, I don’t write down anything about my characters outside what shows up in the story. Most of that stuff, I keep in my head.
Yeah, I have problems actually completing a character sheet. Just forcing myself to think about those things can help though.
Hmmm.
I just don’t like delving into detail if that detail won’t make any great influence to the character or the plot. (In Dumbledore’s case, the fact that he was gay did make an impact to the character; come on, he was wearing high heels) If I had written down a character’s first childhood memory or pet peeve, then I would feel oblidged to put that detail into the story and I end up getting sidetracked. I’m really diffusive like that.
When did Dumbledore wear heels?
In the Sorceror’s Stone?
High heeled boots or something. But really, what were you expecting, Converse?
Really? I never noticed that. Actually, I really don’t notice anyone’s footwear, even in real life – I hate shoe shopping and could care less about shoes.
I sympathize. I can never find shoes that really fit me, and it’s so annoying to put them on and then have to take them off again.
EXACTLY!
and could care less about shoes.
Awww…. ;.; I love shoes…
1 to 58 of 58