Other - How to Create Realistic and Believable Characters How to Create Realistic and Believable Characters 1. Before you think of your character, you need to think of your character's purpose. Is their purpose to hinder your character? Help him? Is he the main character? 2. 3. 4. Quick Tips: · The most important thing is to treat your character like a real person. · Remember that your character is not a real person. · Make sure your main character changes through his experiences. · Give reasons for your characters' personality traits. · Stay within the boundaries of your character's personality!
Mary Sue Test Background A Mary Sue is an unrealistic type of literary character commonly created by inexperienced authors. Although they vary, a typical Mary Sue has an unreasonable number of cool or special traits, especially ones the author wishes he or she had, and they tend to accomplish things too easily, solve problems too neatly, and become the center of attention whether they deserve it or not. This test aims to help authors evaluate whether their characters are in danger of becoming Mary Sues by drawing attention to potentially problematic traits. When taking this test, be honest, but keep it in perspective and remember context. The test has seven sections: This test comes from this thread in the Writer's Block subforum on TV Tropes. Section 1: Author Avatars There's nothing wrong with using yourself as the basis for a character. Generally, items in this section score one point each. Scoring -28-0: Your character may be an antihero. 1-10: Your character is understated. Return to top
Basic Tips To Write Better (And More Likeable) Badasses Yet another character type that is often poorly-written by amateurs, many badass characters end up becoming completely unlikeable or even despicable. Here are a few tips to keep these characters from going this route. Your character needs to be more than tough and talented. Strong, sexy, smart, skilled, and sassy are all great character traits, but on their own they're going to leave you with a character who is at best forgettable, and at worst completely unlikeable. You build a good badass the same way you build any other character type - by creating a complex, three-dimensional, nuanced character with believable emotions, fears, hopes, vulnerabilities, hobbies, quirks, etc. Stop and ask yourself: if you took away the skills and talents that make your character badass, do you think anyone would care about or want to associate with your character? Don't create an unstoppable kickass machine. Be careful that your character doesn't become an amoral/self-centered jerkass.
Basic Tips To Create Better Characters With Tragic & Traumatic Backstories First, ask yourself why you're giving your character a tragic or traumatic backstory. Are you giving your character this backstory to build up/explain what kind of person your character is now? Or are you doing it mainly to make readers or other characters feel sorry for your character, or to make your character seem more badass/tough for having survived the ordeal? Or are you doing it mainly to give your character a reason to run away from home and/or have nobody to be attached to so xe can go hang out with the cool characters with nothing to pull xir away? The first one is a legitimate reason to give your character a tragic/traumatic backstory. The rest are spurious at best. Even worse, trauma/tragedy often is used as little more than a device to give an intended love interest a reason to want to lavish care and affection on xir. Benjamin Linus from Lost is a good example of a tragic/traumatic backstory used to good effect. The trauma/tragedy should make sense in-universe.
Common, Yet Terrible Character Descriptors - And How To Fix Them When asked to describe their characters, many people tend to use the same over-generalized descriptors over and over. The result tends to be what I call a "Forer profile" - it's so vague that it can fit any number of characters - all of whom are wildly different - equally well. And when the same character description could fit a sneaky trickster as it could a determined soldier as it could a grad student opening a florist's shop, that's a problem. For the sake of simplicity, we'll go with "animals" for most of this particular section. Here are other examples of useful statements: "My character volunteers at the animal shelter."" All of the above statements are only a few words longer than "my character loves animals," but contain huge amounts of information in comparison. Don't say your character loves flowers - say that your character raises a flower garden or plans to become a florist. Useless Description Example 2: "My character is fun to be around/My character loves having fun."
So You Wanna Write/Play A Powerful/Talented Character That Probably Won't Be Perceived As A Mary Sue? Many, many, many times I've seen people complain that they can't write or play powerful characters without these characters being labelled as Mary Sues. I really have only one thing to say to this: it's probably either because your characters are Mary Sues, or because you're presenting your character the wrong way. Sure it's not the former? Okay, then let's get on to how you can present your character so people probably won't grab the torches and pitchforks. This article is largely intended for fan characters, though most of it applies to other character types as well. Start by describing what makes your character tick, not what makes xir special. When you begin your character profile/pitch, leave out your character's appearances, superpowers, and canon connections as long as you possibly can. If you have a well-developed character, you should be able to describe xir without mentioning xir powers, abilities, or canon connections quite easily. Remove irrelevant specialness.
The Universal Mary Sue Litmus Test Stuck with a case of massive writer's block? Has your muse gone on indefinite hiatus? Or are you just bored? Check out the random generators - with a click of a button, you can create characters, names, settings, items, and more for your creative works! The Universal Mary Sue Litmus Test How to use this test: First, if you're unsure of what a Mary Sue is, please read this page. Answer all questions for which the answer is 'yes' or 'technically yes' unless the item mentioned is so commonplace in the universe you are writing for that it doesn't really make your character remarkable or unusual. If your character is a role-playing character and the only reason you can answer 'yes' is because of other players acting of their own free wills (IE, everyone has their characters throwing themselves at your character's feet and you've done nothing to force this) do not answer yes to the corresponding question. Part 1 - All Characters Questions that pertain to all characters everywhere.
Writing Characters | Creative Writing Course In this fifth session in my free creative writing course, we will be looking at writing characters. In creative writing we become, in a way, like God. In short stories, novels and poems, we construct a world then fill it with people who take on a life of their own. Iris Murdoch described a novel as ‘a fit house for free characters to live in’. Character, Plot and Message There are three kinds of stories: those that start from character, from plot or from message. A message-driven story is one where a writer starts with an idea or theme (enviromentalism, religion, anti-war etc) then crafts a plot and populates it with types who will best illustrate the message. A character-based story is when the characters are so memorable and well-drawn that the story would not exist without them. The key of course if to have all three elements in balance. Exercise 16: Think of your own writing. Starting from Character That being said, I still think the best way to write is to start with character.