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Good evening, Ereki!

Today’s the first day of our character development topic discussion. I know everyone has different ways of developing their characters and different orders in which they like to do things, so instead of telling you how you should do that, my goal with this topic discussion is simply to explore and practice different aspects of character development. Then you can use them in whatever order you want when you actually get to developing a character.

This week’s discussion is on virtues and vices. These traits are likely the first thing a reader is going to realize (if only subconsciously) about your character.

Some common problems when deciding on which traits to give your character:

1) Randomly assigning traits that don’t make sense together (though people are paradoxes — we’ll get to that in a minute)

2) NOT even deciding on character traits

3) Giving a character traits but not having them displaying those traits.

We’ll get to point 3 next week with a short writing assignment, but this week I want us to talk about points 1 and 2. I wouldn’t recommend trying out point 2, unless you’re writing a first draft. But point 1 can be tricky at times…and that’s where our discussion comes in 😉

Discussion question: what factors should we consider when deciding what traits to give our characters? How do we make it such that we have a unified character who is still human (because humans are contradictory at times) and keep a balance of virtues and vices?

As with other discussions we’ve had for conflict, I’m not looking for a “right” answer to this. This is an opportunity for us to learn from one another’s answers are we explore character development. 🙂

P.S. I’d highly recommend The Positive Trait Thesaurus and The Negative Trait Thesaurus. They have some great thoughts and pointers on this topic.

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