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That information is really helpful. Thank you 🙂
I didn’t know that Story Embers had a character questionnaire, but I will be sure to check it out.
P.S Thanks for the compliment on my profile picture. I have a strange obsession with anything foxes. XD
You have a ton of awesome advice thus far! I will just say as well….make your characters unique. Make them individual…everyone in real life will have their own unique strengths and weaknesses, and portraying that in your characters really brings them to life to your reader.
I’m glad you are here, as well. SE is indeed an amazing community. 😀
Assistant Guildmaster of the Phantom Awesome Meraki
~ Created to create ~That’s good advice, thank you. 🙂 I’m still trying to get to know my character, get inside their heads, figure out just how they work XD
Of course! I understand…it is definitely an ongoing process that you can never be too good at. XD
Assistant Guildmaster of the Phantom Awesome Meraki
~ Created to create ~What’s the best way you’ve found to get inside your character’s heads?
Oo, that is an awesome question!
One thing would be just researching (or detailed worldbuilding for fantasy writers) a lot, so that you really understand where the individual character is coming from/how they think.
Also, studying the personality types here so that you understand the brains of a lot of different personalities, and how that interacts with the situations you write about, is super helpful!
Beyond that, I think just the fact that I really live inside their heads a lot just ’cause I think about them and their perspectives while just walking around during the day, brainstorming, helps as well. I don’t know if most writers think about all their characters like that or not, but the more I think about them and what their reaction would be to certain situations helps me write them so much better and more individualized. 🙂 And making your characters so unique just makes your story!
Assistant Guildmaster of the Phantom Awesome Meraki
~ Created to create ~Wow, thank you so much. I never really thought about their personality types, and how they would react in different situations… It’s definitely something I’ll think about now. XD
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!
"A hard heart is no infallible protection against a soft head."
- C. S. Lewis
Totally! You ask so many awesome questions, you’ll probably turn out the best writer among us. 🙂
Assistant Guildmaster of the Phantom Awesome Meraki
~ Created to create ~Wow. I am actually at a loss for words. (Which probably isn’t good for a writer XD) Your advice is amazing. I am honestly surprised you aren’t writing articles for SE. Thank you. You have helped me a great deal.
*blushes*
Thank you! I’m so glad it helped. Haha, I’ve actually thought about writing a few articles for SE but never seem to have the time to sit down and think one out(plus, I tend to ramble something terrible and there’s a word limit I believe XD).
"A hard heart is no infallible protection against a soft head."
- C. S. Lewis
I would totally read any article you create. 😀 But I get the “not having time” thing. I know what’s it like to feel like there’s not enough hours in the day.
But seriously, your advice was phenomenal! I can see now how I was making my characters react like I would, instead of giving them personality’s of their own. It makes so much sense.
*mind blown*
* gives thunderous applause*
Aw, thanks so much!
Haha, yeah, it’s a big pet peeve of mine when characters seem to similar to the author/to similar to each other, and since I read a lot of fanfiction, I’ve gotten pretty good at spotting it out, since when writing/reading fanfiction it’s usually pretty obvious if a character is OOC.
Personally, I get annoyed about it because it makes the story much more boring, and also because it limits everything to the author’s POV. Any question or answer you get from any character will be from the author’s POV, which also limits tension because people don’t usually tend to disagree with themselves, if you get what I mean. It’s especially a problem in Christian fiction, since the Christian entertainment industry tends to portray everything as very black and white, with clear cut morality that(in my opinion) comes from accepting everything at face value and never looking further. (I’m not saying that some things aren’t black and white, but when it comes to humanity, Christian media and entertainment is really bad about thinking why someone is where they are, not just how to get them away from it. (if you know what I mean lol)). But characters being clear-cut is just something I don’t enjoy reading and never will. It’s one of my main complaints with Tolkien’s works, because for all his beauty in language and complexity, there’s not much to characters(except for perhaps Merry, Pippin, Faramir, plus Gimli and Legolas’s relationship).
Plus, you really can’t ever have questions to answer if you don’t have two sides in the first place. You may not agree with everything your character thinks at first–that’s okay. That’s what character arcs are for–your job is to simply make sure you’re not forcing your character’s worldview on your audience, but instead using it to make them think about why the correct worldview(the one presented in the Bible) is correct.
I’m rambling again(because honestly I could go on for hours about this), so I’ll quit while I’m ahead and let you attempt to answer to my mess of confusing ideas. XD
"A hard heart is no infallible protection against a soft head."
- C. S. Lewis
Is it scary that I completely understand everything you said, and completely agree with all of it?!? What you say makes a lot of sense, to me at least. (Plus I don’t mind the rambling, I do it all the time! Lol!)
I get what you mean about characters sometimes feeling one-dimensional. (Although I don’t notice it all the time.)
Question: What, it your opinion, makes a well rounded character?
Also, please go on for hours about this. I need all the help I can get! XD
“In their purest form, (flat characters) are constructed round a single idea or quality: when there is more than one factor in them, we get the beginning of the curve towards the round. The really flat character can be expressed in one sentence such as ‘I never will desert Mr. Micawber.’ There is Mrs. Micawber—she says she won’t desert Mr. Micawber, she doesn’t, and there she is. Or: ‘I must conceal, even by subterfuges, the poverty of my master’s house.’
“There is Caleb Balderstone in The Bride of Lammermoor. He does not use the actual phrase, but it completely describes him; he has no existence outside it, no pleasures, none of the private lusts and aches that must complicate the most consistent of servitors. Whatever he does, wherever he goes, whatever lies he tells or plates he breaks, it is to conceal the poverty of his master’s house. It is not his idée fixe, because there is nothing in him into which the idea can be fixed. He is the idea, and such life as he possesses radiates from its edges and from the scintillations it strikes when other elements in the novel impinge.
…
“One great advantage of flat characters is that they are easily recognized whenever they come in—recognized by the reader’s emotional eye, not by the visual eye, which merely notes the recurrence of a proper name.
“In Russian novels, where they so seldom occur, they would be a decided help. It is a convenience for an author when he can strike with his full force at once, and flat characters are very useful to him, since they never need reintroducing, never run away, have not to be watched for development, and provide their own atmosphere—little luminous disks of a pre-arranged size, pushed hither and thither like counters across the void or between the stars; most satisfactory.
“A second advantage is that they are easily remembered by the reader afterwards. They remain in his mind as unalterable for the reason that they were not changed by circumstances; they moved through circumstances, which gives them in retrospect a comforting quality, and preserves them when the book that produced them may decay. The Countess in Evan Harrington furnishes a good little example here. Let us compare our memories of her with our memories of Becky Sharp. We do not remember what the Countess did or what she passed through. What is clear is her figure and the formula that surrounds it, namely, ‘Proud as we are of dear papa, we must conceal his memory.’ All her rich humour proceeds from this. She is a flat character. Becky is round … because she waxes and wanes and has facets like a human being.
“All of us, even the sophisticated, yearn for permanence, and to the unsophisticated permanence is the chief excuse for a work of art. We all want books to endure, to be refuges, and their inhabitants to be always the same, and flat characters tend to justify themselves on this account. All the same, critics who have their eyes fixed severely upon daily life—as were our eyes last week—have very little patience with such renderings of human nature. Queen Victoria, they argue, cannot be summed up in a single sentence, so what excuse remains for Mrs. Micawber?
“But in a novel (a flat character) has its place: a novel that is at all complex often requires flat people as well as round, and the outcome of their collisions parallels life more accurately than (a critic of flatness) implies. The case of Dickens is significant. Dickens’ people are nearly all flat (Pip and David Copperfield attempt roundness, but so diffidently that they seem more like bubbles than solids). Nearly every one can be summed up in a sentence, and yet there is this wonderful feeling of human depth. Probably the immense vitality of Dickens causes his characters to vibrate a little, so that they borrow his life and appear to lead one of their own. It is a conjuring trick; at any moment we may look at Mr. Pickwick edgeways and find him no thicker than a gramophone record. But we never get the sideway view. Mr. Pickwick is far too adroit and well trained. He always has the air of weighing something, and when he is put into the cupboard of the young ladies’ school he seems as heavy as Falstaff in the buck-basket at Windsor. Part of the genius of Dickens is that he does use types and caricatures, people whom we recognize the instant they re-enter, and yet achieves effects that are not mechanical and a vision of humanity that is not shallow. Those who dislike Dickens have an excellent case. He ought to be bad. He is actually one of our big writers, and his immense success with types suggests that there may be more in flatness than the severer critics admit.”
Forster, E. M.. Aspects of the Novel (pp. 67-72). RosettaBooks. Kindle Edition.
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