Fuse Blog

In order to understand your characters, you need to dive into their minds and pasts. I recommend mentally sitting down with your characters one at a time in order to find out the following information about each of them. Listen to your characters’ answers and watch their reactions to the questions, as reactions can often be more telling than answers.

• Name
• Age
• Hair color
• Eye color
• Height
• Favorite color
• Worst and best physical feature
• Glasses, contacts, or have perfect vision
• Hobbies and interests
• Collections
• Neat or sloppy
• Talents
• Most embarrassing moment
• Heroes
• Relationship with parents
• Vices
• Strong personality traits
• The major goal for the character in your story and why is it important
• Events from the character’s past make this goal so significant
• What your character’s life is like right now, including family situation, motivations, job, etc…

Everything about your character is worth writing down. Unusual details from character interviews have a strange way of showing up in stories, so take time to get to know your characters before you try to write an epic adventure about them.

Jacob

Stumble it!

Tags: Character development

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 29th, 2008 at 12:24 pm and is filed under How To, Write, Writing Tools. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.