Activity

@shadowwriter161

In relation to your question about getting inside a character’s head, a huge thing for me when writing and reading is how that character perceives the world.

Is your character pessimistic, optimistic, or realistic? Practical and focused, or a bit of a dreamer or idealist? If someone offers them help that they obviously need, do they gratefully take it, pridefully refuse, or suspect the offer to be manipulation of some sort?

The way a character views and reacts to the world around him is essential to understanding and getting inside your character’s head. Think about it. Would Frodo from Lotr snobbishly decline aid in any form? Obviously not, because it’s not his character. I see a lot of writers trying to make their characters react how they would react–but your characters aren’t you. They’re certainly a part of you, but they’re not you. You didn’t find a dragon egg like Eragon, or a magic ring like Bilbo, or grow up in a dystopian society like Katniss. You can’t always exactly relate to what happens to them, but you can relate to their emotions about something, but in turn you can’t relate to their emotions if you can’t get inside their head. So write them like original people, and carefully craft every thought and bit of dialogue to fit each character’s personality.

One thing to beware of is making one character only one thing–for example, the sarcastic or angry character. Sure, we love a good sarcastic line, but no one, in any situation, is ever going to have the perfect retort for everything or be in the mood to be sarcastic all the time. Banter is great, but use it sparingly. Focus more on creating each character with unique reactions to certain things. For example, how would each of your characters react to a betrayal? To a certain character being of an “evil race/nationality”? To learning one character has some forbidden/rare gift? One person might be jealous of the gift, another might be in awe, another might push the bearer of the gift to train and train to defeat the villain.

Anyhow, sorry for rambling so much, I hope this helped some!