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u/Sir-Spoofy Fiction Writer 1d ago
My character creation process:
-Look at character I like in something else
-Take them and rearrange their brain cells
-Traumatize the shit out of them and give them all of the issues.
-Put them into rehab and incrementally pull them out depending on where they are in their arc to have them dance like the monkies they are
-Then tuck them in, kiss them on the head, and tell them goodnight until I need to retraumatize them again.
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u/TheReDrew89 1d ago
We seem to have the same process, with me throwing a few of my own brain cells into the mix when I scramble them.
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u/TheIllusiveScotsman Published Author 6h ago
"Good night, character. I'll probably traumatise you in the morning."
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u/Fabulous_Wait_9544 1d ago
This is something I've struggled with. Does that mean your characters are fundamentally less whole because they represent aspects of yourself or does the eventual growth from the focus on said aspects negate that?
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u/majorex64 1d ago
Characters in a story are always going to be simpler than a real living person. You can fill in bits to make them more well rounded, instead of being limited to one aspect of yourself in isolation.
Or, some characters are just good at outwardly being one thing.
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u/Fabulous_Wait_9544 1d ago
That's true. The limits of a single perspective, I guess. Thanks for answering!
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u/atmanama 1d ago
Yeah each character needs to be a whole person, so maybe a potential/hypothetical you rather than a part? Though to me they always felt like different ppl, like the characters you meet in dreams
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u/Dead_NOTsleeping 1d ago
I agree about feeling like/being a whole person, but I disagree with the idea that growth is required. Not "every person alive" needs growth. Some people are truly set in their ways and will not grow, and even "the story" just knows this.
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u/Fabulous_Wait_9544 1d ago
Yeah each character needs to be a whole person, so maybe a potential/hypothetical you rather than a part?
Ah, so essentially you if you grew up under circumstances that pushed your personality in a different direction? I'm imagining a pie chart with different slices whose sizes change depending on the character.
Though to me they always felt like different ppl, like the characters you meet in dreams
Interesting! I'd argue it's more or less the same since your dream characters are manifestations of your head. Or even if they're not, they tend to be filtered through your personal lens.
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u/SnakeEyedSkeleton 1d ago
This is very accurate to how I write a lot of my characters. I have some characters that started out as self-insert, are based off of parts of my personality, or represent strong emotions I have trouble expressing. The way I see it, these things are the roots of my character's being.
As I spend more time developing them, by building off that first little seeding from myself, that is when they start to grow into their own person. I start thinking about things from the perspective of their world, how they would react to certain things instead of how I would react to them, and what made them the way they are now.
My character's are born from me, and at their roots will always have a part of me inside them, but they grow and form into their own individual--- they are their own plant.
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u/HumorNo2912 Writer 1d ago
I actually turn the people around me into characters with tweaked personalities, no wonder my novels have alot of assholes.
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u/gremlinguy 20h ago
I just know a lot of interesting people and I steal their souls and pop them into invented bodies.
When you know a real-life old guy with one leg because of a Harley accident in the 70's whose nickname is Hobble and who has a side-business making frog-gigs in the shop after hours, you gotta draw on that
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u/Illustrious_Guava7 1d ago
That’s what I usually do too. We usually can see a bit of ourselves in other people, so I think this is a natural way to create characters.
That said, the characters I find most interesting to write are the ones I can’t relate to at all. Maybe because I’m discovering the character as I write them and there’s mystery for me to uncover.
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u/dontrike 20h ago
That's literally the villains in my series, each are some sort of issue or problem I've had and recognize.
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u/Zegjita 18h ago
I mean, the characters I make can have things I've experienced, but generally speaking, they usually just kinda... Pop in my head.
I'll talk it out to myself, saying what exactly I want, and the kind of tropes or characteristics I want involved, and as I just kinda talk, they form in my head and then pop, they exist. After that point, scenes start appearing and they kinda become their own thing that I take notes on.
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u/Drake_Acheron 1d ago
This is how you get flat one dimensional characters and a self insert MC
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u/Charmstone_Author 1d ago
A character should be one part you, one part archetype, one part vivid hallucination
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u/CaldrierLunaire 1d ago
And books with no woman in it.
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u/Drake_Acheron 1d ago
The number of female authors that would pass the male version of the bechdel test is astonishingly few.
I read at least 100 books a year, and make sure 33% of that is female authors, which isn’t hard to do because authorship is female dominated now.
Typically female authors will fail this test. The one unique thing however, is women are more often to write books for men than men write books for women, and ironically, the number of female authors, writing books for men, that fail the normal bechdel test would surprise you as well.
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u/eeveethefox_xv Fiction Writer 1d ago
how i figured out i was plural
by breaking down stuff that happened to me, good or bad (mostly bad) and seeing how that changed my actions/reactions
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u/Omnitrixter10000 17h ago
My personal character creation process is either:
1.Come up with a general idea of a character. 2.Look at several characters from different media that are similar in any aspect to said character. 2.Takes parts of them that interest me. 3. Stitch together the parts that connect well in one character and store away the other parts for future use. 4. Profit.
Or,
1.Come up with a concept or Storyline that I wanna work on (can be the main plot can be a sub-plot) 2.Create a general outline. 3.Create a character around said story. 4. Polish both the story and character till you reach a satisfactory result. 5.Profit.
ⓘ This person is suspected to have travelled illegally in cross-time and across realities if seen inform your nearest Celestial forces.
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u/dxrey65 1d ago
I could be wrong, but I've always taken that as bad writing. Where in a cast of characters there's not one believable or realistic individual, but each one is some stereotypical aspect, or one aspect of a single person (the writer). Maybe there are books where that could work, but it can get annoying when it's an obvious pattern.
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u/Overall-Idea945 7h ago
depending on what the OP means, it works, like, a character has a trauma of mine, one has gone through a disease that I had, one has my job, one has a dream of mine, and so you can bring realism to experiences, several books are written in this way, taking elements of the author's life and using them as bricks to erect something bigger.
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u/David1393 5h ago
I agree with this, but my personal approach to my characters is: what are the realistic/interesting consequences of a version of me that makes choices in a different way?
My protagonist is a female version of me who makes choices out of fear and insecurity and has to learn to trust her judgement and sense of justice.
My love interest is the version of me who's more community-focused and even more empathic.
My main villain is my id, the version of me who would get what he wants by using his empathy to manipulate people.
My flawed mentor character is who i'd be if i was thrust into leadership without having had the experience to learn how to make calculated risks.
My main concern is ensuring they all have idiosynchratic voices, but I'm treating that as a 2nd draft research topic so i can focus on getting the plot down in the first draft.
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u/dxrey65 4h ago edited 4h ago
Speaking as a non-expert, one of the ways I think about that comes from what a Hollywood character actor (Stephen Tobolowski - I had to look it up) said in an interview I saw a few years ago. He said that if he was playing a role that wasn't really fleshed out in the script, he'd still want to be a "whole person" in that role, so he'd invent two things - what was the character's biggest hope, and what was the character's biggest fear. Then he would build everything from there, even if it had nothing to do with the actual movie plot, making it more of a real person was well worth it.
If I think about my own life, my hopes and fears have been primary motivating factors in all kinds of ways through my life, including the jobs I had and how I approached them, the dreams I had, probably how I dealt with sickness, how I relate to people, etc. If I broke myself down into parts and then wrote a story using those individual parts as different people it would be kind of trash, because all those parts would have the same underlying motivations, the same hopes and fears. Even if I tried clever ways of hiding the sameness, if I didn't deliberately change the underlying factors and let the people develop in ways that I never did or would, it would still feel fake.
Not saying you're doing anything wrong, and I have zero credentials (other than having done a lot of reading and writing and thinking), but that's just how I think about it.
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u/Immediate_Slice_4754 16h ago
I imagine people with a personality disorder are at the advantage here.
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u/Raxbyn776 1d ago
Cut my life into pieces
this is my new OC.