Hot answers tagged character-development
18
You have several advantages over your characters:
You get all the time you need to conduct research.
You have time to think about each thing they will do or say. You get to think through the implications of the situation they're in, and the effects of their actions.
You can constrain and adjust your story world so that your character can excel in it.
You ...
12
As I see it, there are two possible ways for a character to influence others after death, but each has a number of variations.
First, the character could directly influence others after death. This would involve some sort of continued existence either magical or supernatural in origin. Some examples:
Ghost (or any other non-material existence after ...
10
Depending on your entire scenario, you have, I think, three options.
The "ghost" route, whereby the departed exerts influence by appearing in an ethereal form to the various characters. Of course, this has to be consistent with the worldview already expressed, AND you need to explain why there are not hundreds of spirits hanging around, continuing to ...
8
Primarily, cheat by writing the story backwards. Start from the end revelation of the implicit story (the crime) and progress towards beginning, iteratively removing any simplicity.
Start with the outcome, the rather simple final set of events that is to be discovered. Then take it apart: tools, witnesses, methods, motives.
Take a look at each of them. ...
8
There is indeed such a term.
Phil Farrand of The Nitpicker's Guide to Star Trek called this "being the cabbagehead." Certain information had to be revealed to the audience, but it was information which the characters would reasonably already know.
So the writers picked someone in the room to be the "cabbagehead," meaning someone developed the I.Q. of a ...
6
A Mary Sue is a character who passively warps the fabric of the story to their own benefit by virtue of mere existence, and acts only within that context. That's really what most of the extant and often inconsistent definitions boil down to.
The key defining characteristic of this is a sort of reversed narrative causality: The character is unique; therefore ...
6
Set up your world as a version of The Matrix. When the player-character dies, s/he is removed from "the game," and can now only influence other players second-hand: mysterious text messages, altering the headline on a newspaper just as the "living" character looks at it, turning on a TV remotely, etc. So your player-character becomes a kind of deus ex ...
4
What you need to do is show your introvert to the reader when no other characters are looking, or when he's with people he's close to in some sense.
Does your introvert cry when he goes home from his job? Write in his journal or a private blog? Kick himself for not speaking up about something? What about when he talks to his parents, his brother, his ...
4
If I can interpret "I'm still very new" as "writing my first novel", then skip this, go back to your story and keep writing. Ignore everyone telling you anything about how to write. Because all this good advice out there (like on this page) will be clearer after you've struggled through your first novel.
So, no, it is no problem if a main character is based ...
4
I think it largely depends on what kind of "children's book" we're talking about. If this is a book for teenagers (or even "tweenagers"), then it is an excellent way to convey a feeling of restlessness or stress. If we're talking about younger audiences, it might be dangerous simply because the sentences could be confusing to the reader, invoking in them ...
4
I don't know of any women willing to adopt a nickname that calls attention to their being overweight. For one thing, most such nicknames are pejorative or uncomplimentary. For another, many women believe that being overweight is unlikely to improve their public image. Hence an overtly-fat-sounding nickname may lend implausibility to the story, translation ...
3
A "Mary Sue" is a character who represents a highly-idealized version of the author (usually). This is the sort of character who, as needed, can perform brain surgery with one hand on a turbulent jet that she's piloting absent-mindedly while working on a cure for cancer -- that sort of thing. Wikipedia gives the origin as:
The term "Mary Sue" comes ...
3
Option 1: I'm Back!
For an IF game, probably the easiest way to allow character death is to allow some kind of backup, or a chance to be restored to life. Examples include:
Cloning Technology - Your character has been cloned (or can be), and when the original dies, a clone takes his place. This method is used in the classic SF/humor RPG Paranoia, ...
3
"One day, nothing significant happened. Everyone got on as normal". What does your character do on that day? If they cannot get through a normal day, doing normal things - which may vary depending on the setting - then they may be a Mary Sue (a term I had never heard before, but I recognise the trope).
If you are worried that you are creating a Mary Sue, ...
3
Finish the book, then go back and look at the characters again.
When I start writing my characters are fairly generic, flat, and frankly cardboard. Character is my weakness, I love plots and ideas.
The crucial thing is that in the second draft, I then go back and add in bits of the colour, life and uniqueness which the characters have only accumulated by ...
3
Perhaps the problem you are having is you are thinking about it as "character development" not storytelling. Many writers start off working on their work with a formulaic engine of what is going to happen. They know where, when, who and why. They believe this will make their story compelling since they dot every "i" and cross every "t".
If your characters ...
3
According to the tvtropes entry for The Watson,
The Watson is the character whose job it is to ask the same questions the audience must be asking and let other characters explain what's going on.
A sidekick sometimes acts in this role. According to wikipedia,
Sidekicks can provide one or multiple functions, such as a counterpoint to the hero, an ...
2
It seems the trouble you are having is differentiating characters easily. I've found when I have trouble telling between two characters without using their name, then they are not sufficiently different to begin with.
Look into traits list on Google, and read some articles on character diamonds.
Also try backing up your scenes, and then removing all ...
2
Your problem may stem from the fact that you are writing a book too much "by the book." Characters aren't like bits of code. Unless they walk around in your subconscious, speaking and breathing and acting like real people, they won't seem like real people on the page. If your characters don't surprise you, they won't surprise anyone else. Novels are about ...
2
Generators, I've found, tend to produce bland characters. There are few, if any, substitutes for spending time with your characters. Obviously you can't meet your characters in-person. What you can do is use writing prompts to put characters in everyday situations and see how they handle themselves.
A useful tool is stereotyping your character. Think about ...
2
One way would be to sort of "cheat", if that would be acceptable to you. What I mean is that you can try to find some good ideas in real life. Real life is full of strange and wondrous things. Google things like "top criminals of all time" or something in those lines to find a criminal that might suit your character or has made an interesting enough scheme ...
2
The answer is both, to some degree.
Yes, you should always be working harder on your character development. Particularly if you're a beginning writer, you can always work harder on everything, but developed writers have to work at it too.
Making all your characters yourself with minor differences is a problem for a few reasons:
You can't tell them apart. ...
2
I agree: it's a tricky problem.
Some additional thoughts that I have beyond what others have said:
You can simply say that the character accomplished something without giving all the details of how he did it. Like, it's easy to write, "He invented a time machine." How, exactly, does one go about building a time machine? I have no idea. Or he could say, ...
2
Just a few suggestions.
Technology. Advanced technology can look like magic, and is not necessarily obvious to your "average inspector". E.g. the criminal could use tiny robotic spiders, which can crawl around the victim's house, eavesdrop on people (so that the criminal knows things nobody else could possibly know), send back data about where everybody ...
2
Having bullies "breaking in", as you put it, doesn't necessarily have to destroy the character. It's natural that under a lot of stress, his facade would start to crack. Put him in some high-pressure situations, but snatch him away at the last moment if you don't want him to be too damaged, especially if it's early on. It's your story, so you can give him an ...
2
The character has to tailor a solution to fit a given problem, but you are not so limited. You can come up with a problem to fit a clever solution.
Take some obscure thing you happen to know, that an everyman wouldn't be expected to know: say, that the Chinese for "I'm going to hit you with this giant phone" sounds very similar to a phrase meaning "Thank ...
2
You have two things going on: a flashback from the main narrative, and a dream.
If the dream is taking place in the past, that may be a literal flashing-back, but it's not actually a flashback. A flashback is reliable (in the sense of "reliable narrator"), realistic, and a memory of someone. It's a detour from the forward narrative.
A dream, on the other ...
2
Actually, this is the only situation where run-on sentences should be used (and work better than short sentences). In ordinary situations they should be avoided like the plague, but if you really want to translate that the character is tired or nervous or upset, run-on sentences are the way to go. Especially tired or rushed, because the reader will also be ...
2
I'd like to make an amendment to the above. It's entirely possible to have a unique, overly-described character who isn't a Mary Sue, and a character with little to no description who is. There's no real formula that can exactly pin this down. Those listed above have good points and went over the common tell-tale signs, but here's what I consider to be the ...
2
I myself have asked a question regarding this, but over some time I have come to see Mary Sue as an bad term, a term that is used to bully authors into creating generic, standardized characters. I'll explain what I mean below.
The term Mary Sue has been very harmful to women characters. Anyone who tried to create a strong female character was immediately ...
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