ON WRITING: Give Birth to a Character

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All right, so you have your plot, you're not afraid of clichés, now let's talk about characters

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All right, so you have your plot, you're not afraid of clichés, now let's talk about characters. They can be both easy and hard because of the simple fact you're creating a person and that person might go against everything you personally believe in. If you're doing it right, by the time you finish the book you'll know everything about this person. It could be things that don't actually get seen in the book, but you still know it. How they sleep, how they eat, how they talk--you know everything. You are their God, their Lord, their creator. Make him or her come alive in your mind either before you ever write a word about them or as you write.

One question I sometimes got is how do I make such realistic characters? I'm sorry to say this, but there's no magic formula. What works for me might not work for you. Seeing as all I can do is talk about what I do, that's what I'm going to write here. It's not gospel and you may have a better way, but this is my method.

Because I'm a pantser, the only character I have planned out (in the sense I know their name and their sex), is the MC. Everything else comes up as I need it. When I reach a new character I will stop and think about them before I continue, but I won't know if they're going to be in a relationship with the MC, if they'll hate him/her, how important they'll be, none of that. Most of the relationships in my books have come from it developing as I wrote, not me planning it out. I think there's only one relationship in my books I've ever planned from the start, and that was in Guardian of Calandria. GoC is a case where I tried to be a plotter rather than a pantser because I'm a believer that you can't know what kind of writer you are if you don't try everything at least once.

If you're a plotter, you're going to want to have more figured out before you start writing. The same method can be applied to all characters regardless of if you do it as they come up or have it ready from the start.

Create a cheat sheet. This is also known as a character profile. This is to keep it straight and so you have a reference to their looks/traits/whatever if you need it. I'm forgetful; before I kept these sheets my characters would change looks and names constantly. How detailed this profile is will be up to you. Here's what my basic cheat sheet looks like, but you can easily google for a character profile to get a more detailed one.

Name:

Age:

Ethnicity and/or species:

Description:

I'll add more information on a story by story basis.

I'm going to use Freelander as my example since it was the first book I put through a re-write, thus the characters have been a little more developed. I added a section to certain characters stating if they're magic and where from the magic world they're from. If they're related to another character, I'll note that in my list. If they're dating someone, that goes there. If that character has any particular traits worth noting, I'll list them. Like for Josh Ewah he has two siblings, Angie and Sam, his parents are Henry and Molly, his family is from a place called Azrail but he was born in England. He has a gummy bear addiction. He's a nice guy but doesn't open himself up often because his family moves a lot so he keeps things close to his chest. Just talking about his family with Abby was a chore. He has 32 multicolored bracelets on one wrist. Each represents a country he's lived in. There is a scar of a star on his arm; I'll go into details of how he got that scar in that list. For the description I might cut and paste the section(s) in which I wrote them in the book or I'll just list them like black hair, brown eyes, tall, fawk-hawk, etc.

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