z

Young Writers Society


Character backrounds



User avatar
50 Reviews



Gender: Male
Points: 890
Reviews: 50
Tue Aug 08, 2006 5:49 pm
Roaming Shadow says...



I'm sure everyone's had this problem before. You have a great idea in your head, with cool locations and really cool characters. So you start typing, or writting, and your characters are flat. 2-D, skeletons, ho-hum, however you want to put it. This might be because the character came into existance when you started writting. How can this be fixed? I have an idea that may help: backrounds.

Write a short story or something similar about your characters past. Basically, a semi-fleshed out outline of your characters life from birth until when your story begins. This includes parents, siblings, significant events surrounding or part of the life, where they grew up, what interests they found and how, friends made, jobs had, and so on. When you know where your characters came from and what they've lived through, it will tell you a lot about who they are now, and give you ideas on who they will become or what they're likely to do. It's helped me develop a particulartly skeletal character in one of my books (and a very stubborn skeleton at that). So, give it a try. Maybe you'll even get plot ideas from it.

(To give credit where credit is due, Snoink's Character Development usergroup motivated me to write this, since my original backround writtings were kinda accidental.)
  








Forgiveness is the fragrance that the violet sheds on the heel that has crushed it.
— Mark Twain