Creating the Cast: The Web of Characters Populating the Story World
Trimming the cast every now and then will help clean up your story. This section explains how to check your cast and trim the characters who are not adding to the story.
Category: Character Creation
How to create a meaningful character.
Plot: cause and effect becomes stimulus and response
In storytelling, background (cause) leads to plot development (effect) and vice versa. Stimulus and response are a form of cause and effect.
Empathy: Hooking the Reader to Characters
Getting the reader to care about your characters requires evoking the right emotion, empathy. This should not be confused with sympathy.
Making the Comic Relief Character
Comic Relief: Writing is all about balance. You need to bring the tension up and release it with relaxation or humour. Give the reader a break so he can keep reading without forcing a break by putting the book down.
Writing a realistic fighter
It’s easy to forget how natural and common violence truly is. People use violence, simply because it works. Here’s all you need to know to writer a fighter
Building Characters with Archetypes
The archetype is the foundation of a character. He is the groundwork onto which the writer builds layers of personality.
The most interesting heroes and heroines archetypes
The hero and heroine archetypes help writers lay the foundation for characters, showing how they think, feel and what drives them.
Creating the Threshold Guardian
Threshold guardians keep unworthy people from going through doorways and gates. They can be against the hero, indifferent to the hero or even allies but they will still always serve their purpose. No one goes onto the next stage before proven to be worthy. They can be thought of as bouncers, bodyguards or doorkeepers and represent ordinary obstacles people encounter in life such as prejudice, bad luck and opposition.
Creating the mentor
The mentor is the one who aids or trains the hero. They teach the hero, protect him and give him useful (often essential) gifts. The word comes from The Odyssey, in which a character named Mentor guides the hero. The mentor relationship often resembles that of a parent-child relationship. They are what the hero might become (and transcend) if he continued on the road of trails. They are the higher self, the wiser and nobler part of us.
Creating the hero protagonist
The word “Hero” is Greek and it means “to protect and serve”. It is someone who would sacrifice his own needs to help others. In psychology terms, according to Freud, the individual consists of three layers. The it, the ego and the superego. The it represents desires and doesn’t care about right or wrong. The superego doesn’t care about anything other than right or wrong. The ego is left in the middle. It has the it telling it what it wants and the superego telling it what it shouldn’t want and the ego must mediate between the two.
The 7 Essential Archetype Roles for your story
Every story needs characters of some sort to tell the tale. The following 7 character roles are the essential roles in any story.
The secret to creating three-dimensional characters
The first step to character creation is research. You are not just creating a flat persona to fulfill a thingy that needs doing in your story, you are creating a person. As you are creating this person, you will get to know him in full detail. The reader will only see about 10% of him, the tip of the iceberg, but the writer should know him completely.
Odd characters: creating non-realistic persons
Non-realistic characters come in four types:
The symbolic character
the non-human character
the fantasy character
the mythic character
Creating the villain (antagonist)
The villain opposes the protagonist. This makes him the second most important character in the story. Villains are usually antagonists though not all antagonists are villains.
Analysis: Pitch Perfect’s Hero’s Journey
This analysis reveals the film Pitch Perfect to have the Hero’s Journey structure and makes use of basic character Archetypes.
Introducing a Character: Essential steps to bring a character to life
Step one, name your character something meaningful. Step two, give a suitable body. Step three, put that body in a significant place. Step four, him.
The protagonist’s problem
A story is about a problem. Your protagonist is the one experiencing the problem. Why? Because you, the writer, has designed him for it. The bigger the problem is, the bigger the person has to be, to be capable of resolving it. That’s why only your protagonist can resolve your story-worthy problem.
Character questions to ask yourself
Questions about characters to ask yourself as you revise your work and prepare to make the final touches before sending it out.
