Creating Characters

NRoach · Jan 27, 2015

jpoelma13 said:
Mr. Ritchie is there anything you don't hate? You're always saying that YOUR way of writing is the best, and that everyone else is obviously wrong. I'm tired of your crusade on strawmen. None of your diatribes about the "evils" of planning have proved much of anything.
You have to know how to use those checklists if you want to use them. I agree that those checklists often contain irrelevant character traits, but they mainly exist to give people ideas for characters nothing more. It is up to the writer to decide what's important and what's not, and thenwhether the entire character is likeable--providing they need to be likeable. No one with any sense follows those things to the letter; that includes planners like myself.
As for your claim that I should base my stories on real people, I write FANTASY novels. The novel I am currently writing has a demon in it. Do you know any demons Mr Ritchie, because I've never met any. I suppose I could summon Satan, and interview him, but that sounds a like a very bad idea. And I'm not about to write people I don't like into a novel as demons. That's just plain wrong.

"Resident curmudgeon"

Neegh · Jan 27, 2015

blacbird said:
Characters do not exist separate from story. Period. Think story, and characters will come along with it.

caw

Or think characters and all a-sudden you got yourself a story.

blacbird · Jan 27, 2015

Marian Perera said:
I don't use checklists myself. I'm just saying, I didn't create any of my characters by thinking of real people or trying to base those characters on real people.

I don't base my characters directly on real people, either. But I use characteristics of real people, as I observe them to be, and as appropriate to character interaction in the story. I just find the idea of "creating" a character based on criteria from a checklist, absent of an actual story, to be absurd.

caw

Marian Perera · Jan 27, 2015

blacbird said:
I don't base my characters directly on real people, either. But I use characteristics of real people, as I observe them to be, and as appropriate to character interaction in the story.

So we all have our own ways of creating characters. One writer may base their characters strictly on real people, one writer may use certain characteristics of real people, another writer might have an alternative method that doesn't rely on real people at all. Different things work for different writers.

Ravioli · Jan 27, 2015

I've actually always based my MCs on people I know, usually crushes because they fascinate me and motivate/inspire me the most. My current MC is no different. There's that extremely cute kid working at the shop next to mine, and he's just such a hot mess - at first glance, a sweet, innocent Christian bumblef*ck village boy who uses a lot of heart emoticons, and then you hear screams coming from his shop and minutes later his coworker rushes by announcing she's just quit because he sprayed her with lemon-flavored air freshener. And those mood swings, cheerful and perky for a few weeks, then oozing murder the next, always having his moods coming off of him in indiscrete, obvious waves.
How can you not "steal" that for a book?

Lillith1991 · Jan 27, 2015

NRoach said:
"Resident curmudgeon"

Not an excuse.

Creating Characters

NRoach

Neegh

blacbird

Marian Perera

starting over

Ravioli

Crazy Cat Lady

Lillith1991

The Hobbit-Vulcan hybrid