The Creation of Characters

Guess what everyone? Today we are going to talk about the way we are constructing our characters and the best way to organize everything in order to make your ‘little children’ perfect to fit in your plot. Haha! I love to call my characters my little children because you create them from scratch. Maybe you’ll find this strange but one of the aspects I love about writing is the fact that you are the one that decides if they live or if they die. Us, the writers are the ones who decide our characters destiny.

When I wrote my first book, I made my main character similar to me as a person. This isn’t something wrong. I mean all of our characters will have a characteristic taken from our own personality. It’s absolutely normal, but my advice for all of you is: do try and make them different as much as possible. Try and create characters that stand out from your own personality. Do create characters with aspects that aren’t familiar to you in any way. For example, I am a really shy person and really reserved, so I tried to make some of my characters stand out by being extrovert. The people around you are a continuous source of inspiration, take every beautiful yet disturbing characteristic from them and create other fictional people.

Another aspect that you should always be careful with when you write and create characters is to write down every aspect. Take even a piece of paper and write, blue eyes, big smile, long blonde curly hair. Believe me, that piece of paper will save your life when you’ll get to page 200. When you’ll get caught up in the plot creation, you’ll forget the first characteristic of your characters. This happened to me. It wasn’t fun to search a 250 pages book just to see what eye color my main character had. Also, do think about their interests, age, family background, motivation, people they surround themselves with, habits (nervous tick), the way they talk, interests, opinions. Every single aspect of this kind is important for the moment you build up your character.

 

The writer’s job is to get the main character up a tree, and then once they are up there, throw rocks at them.

Vladimir Nabokov

One book that will help you with character organization is ‘Monkeys with Typewriters’ by Scarlett Thomas. It is a really great book, simply written and easy to understand. It is well organized helping you with every aspect concerning writing fiction. There was an interesting exercise to make you think about characters and the way they are constructed. Think of two controversial characters either from a movie, or a book, or a series, any controversial character that comes up your mind. Now, after you did that, write down what makes them controversial. Each aspect of it. That is the way you should create your characters. Think about them with every detail possible.

You are the creators of this universe. The aspects that I am talking about in my articles are things that I have experienced in my writing process and I wanted to share with you. I will do an article regarding specific creative writing books that will help you even more with this process. I believe that in order to improve your writing skills, of course, you should read and take all advice into consideration, but until you experience them, they are just advice. Do write as much as you can! Create and don’t be afraid of anything.

 

I am in Bucharest, everyone! I am back in my hometown and ready for three weeks of total madness and fun. I can’t wait to see what this crazy holiday will unveil. I am really happy that I am able to drive again. If you want to see more of my adventures (I like to call my everyday activities, adventures. Haha!) check out my personal Instagram @popescuioanaa. Do follow @alexjostories to see more amazing photos and keep updated on the blog posts! I hope you guys loved this article and I hope it was helpful for all aspiring authors out there. #Seeyousoon guys and have a great Easter!

Happy Easter from AlexJoStories!

 

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