Young Writers Society

Author's Note

First of all, I've been wanting to write this tutorial for a long long time. So why haven't I written it? Every time I started to plot it out, the tutorial ended up becoming completely long, and I wasn't sure how to shorten it.

No more. I won't try to shorten it. In this thread, this will be like one of those hideously long novels in some of the story sections. That is, every once and a while, I'll add another chapter that goes into the subjects discussed ahead of this one.

If you have any questions or comments, feel free to ask within this forum.

Introduction to Characters

A character is a person in your story.

Now, a lot of you may be rolling your eyes when you see that sentence. "I know this already," you might be muttering to yourself, wondering why I would bring that up. But it is important, so important that I will repeat it again:

A character is a person in your story.

A character is not a puppet you can manipulate whenever you feel like it. A character is not your slave, bent to do your will. A character is not a little toy that you can fling away whenever you get bored. A character is a person. A fictional one, yes, but a person nonetheless.

Remember that.

An author who knows his craft well shows us this. Instead of just slapping together some sort of clichéd character together for a certain plot, the character is real to us. We can identify ourselves or other people in this character. That's what makes us love or hate the character.

Characters are what make the story interesting to us. There is no plot that hasn't already been done before. Any idea you have thought up has usually been done in some form or another by someone before you. For instance, when I first conceived my idea of FREAK, I thought it was the most original idea ever. Nope. As soon as I joined YWS, I found a very similar story to FREAK that seemed to be a copy/paste job of the plot of FREAK. No, never judge a story on just a plot alone. What makes a story real to us are the characters.

For instance, we all love action films, right? The most popular action films ever made have got to be the Bond films. The idea of a lone man working to save the world is an extremely clichéd plot, but with Bond and his martinis (shaken, not stirred) it brought the story to life. A good character will do this.

So how do you create good characters?

The answer will surprise you.

First, you begin with a cliché...

*listens intently* Story time!

Actually, I am pretty curious as to how you're going to continue that. See, my characters just appear, lol. I don't remember thinking any of them up. It's as if I just meet them along the way. I think that's why I've received compliments on my characters and dialogue - I feel like I'm just recording what they're saying and doing. I interact with my characters as if they were real people. Sometimes I need to get into the mindset of one of them or think, "What would so-and-so do?" in order to get through a rough situation. Odd? Yes. Invisible friends? In a way, I suppose. That's how they began for me. But now they call themselves characters, and they've chained me to my laptop and forced me to tell their story.

Anyway, my main point of that ramble is that your characters need to be real to you. So he has three eyes and naturally pink hair. Big deal. He still has to have a believable personality. Unless you're writing a horribly ridiculous story... Then I suppose you could have a big, buff biker sing in a soprano voice while doing ballet. Or you could just go to San Francisco, but that's another story.

There are more ways to create characters, right? I mean, you can write about the person you see on the way to school everyday (Bernard), or you can take your best friend, switch his or her gender, and place that person in a story.

I'll stop interrupting now. Tell us - how do you create good characters if they don't come naturally to you?