Insights into Character Creation & Development

As I write stories for my upcoming Counting Down the Days book, I find myself in a continuous search for what makes a good story. This post is a follow-up post to this one on believable characters in any fictional work.

For characters to be believable, the author needs to know each and every one of them in a very personal way. How they behave, their looks, their thoughts and pretty much everything else about them.

One of the most effective ways of achieving this is through the use of a character questionnaire. It is by asking questions about your characters that you gain full understanding of everything about them.
There are two notable character questionnaires that any writer can use. Others exist, and the following can be tweaked to better address your kind of writing.
You may also want to have a look at this 30-question character questionnaire.

Quetionnaire 1
This one is from Gotham's Writers' Writing Fiction Workshop.

Down the character questionnaire here [.doc 24.5KB]

Questionnaire 2
This questionnaire is available thanks to French author Marcel Proust. It is worth noting that these questions are frequently used during interviews.

Download the character questionnaire here [.doc 26KB]

In other news, reading a lot, much more than you write is necessary for any writer. In this regard, I have come across the following Writes for All compilation that was published in May 2011. It features wonderful short stories from talented emerging writers.

Until the next insights in our Creative Writing insights series, do have a great reading and writing.
Cheers :)

Believable Characters Tell Their Own Story

"Good writing..., teaches the learning writer about style, graceful narration, plot development, the creation of believable characters, and truth-telling."

- Stephen King [On Writing]

Characters are a key component of any story. Believable characters make a great story.

In creative writing, character development is such an important part of the process that if not done well, the paper-thin characters in a story can fatally injure a solid plot, flawless grammar and vivid description.

Believable Characters
That said, what's a believable character and how are they developed?

Well, a believable character is one that is perceived by and interacts with the reader just like real people do. This equally applies to anthropomorphized creatures and objects, as well as beings with super-human attributes.

A character becomes believable when it has emotions, performs actions, behaves in a unique manner, communicates, thinks, has habits and does whatever else is in the interest of plot development. Characters come to life when they talk, do things and make decisions.

Description
One of the easiest ways to water down your characters is through what is essentially an important tool in story telling - description.

You see, description is at the heart of narration. It is through description that the story environment is conveyed to the reader. Description in a written story, much unlike in a movie, drama or a TV show, relies on words.

These words, which the omnipresent writer freely controls, can be over-used in describing aspects of the character which would be better served if the characters themselves portrayed them through word and deed. Following is an example to illustrate this:

Portray Character Through Action
If a short story has a character who needs to be portrayed as a quiet and introverted person, the writer needs not tell the reader that David was usually quiet while in the company of his friends, contributing very little to their overall conversations.

A better way of presenting David's character would be to actually have a scene where other participants in the group actively carry out the conversation, while David says very little. He would then opt to take a stroll alone while his friends either played a game of cards or went out to party.

The interactions of characters with other characters, the words they say, the music they play, the movies they watch, their habits... that is what makes characters believable. It also facilitates plot development sans boring wordy prose.

Your thoughts?

Note: Next, we take a look at description in our ongoing creative writing insights.