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BUILDING CHARACTERS MADE EASY
by Billie A. Williams Approximately 17,000 Words by Billie A Williams
Table of Contents
I. Introduction
II. Building Character Profiles Through the Zodiac 1. Zodiac signs on 3 x 5 cards 2. Basic Meaning of 12 Zodiac Signs with a two word anchor 3. How Astrology Can Help Increase Character Conflict 4. Archetypes
III. Personalities Defined by: 1. Careers for Your Characters 2. Which Tree Did You Fall From 3. Character Traits As Assigned to the Months of the Year
IV. Getting To Know Your Characters Through Profile Sheets 1. Lead Character Fact Sheet 2. Opposition Character Fact Sheet 3. Other Character Fact Sheets 4. Character Chart Creation Profiler 5. Character Prompt and Profiles Sheet - Short 6. Fiction Writer’s Character Chart (Link) 7. Characters in Fiction 8. Characters in Romance 9. Types of Heroes For Your Novel (especially Romance) 10. Character Worksheets 11. Character Building 12. Biography Data Sheet and Variations
V. Miscellaneous 1. Bringing Your Character to Life 2. Six Questions to Ask of Your Story 3. Story Idea Check List 4. Using Your Five Senses 5. Creating Believable well-Rounded Characters with Hobbies, Pets, Nickname, Body Language 6. Defining Facial Features, lips, teeth, eyes, nose 7. Using Tarot Cards in Character Development
VI. Naming Your Character – Considerations
VII. Alternative Ways to Explore Character 1. Character Explorations 2. Our Happiness 3. Our Qualms – Our Fears 4. Exercises Dialogue 5. Creating Characters Through Interviews 6. Narrative Boundaries
VIII. Personality/Character Problem Fixers 1. Ten Character Fixes 2. Talking Head Avoidance 3. The Plot Thickens
THE END: There are no Right or Wrong Ways to Write Proof is in the Doing
INTRODUCTION
Why should I waste my time with all these character building forms, exercises and readings? Why can’t I just dive in and write my story using whatever people I choose naming them as I go along. You can, but the list of reasons why you shouldn’t is almost as long as the table of methods, ways and means for building a character profile. The short answer is consistency, believability, reliability, and keeping details straight. Let’s look at each of these reasons more closely. Consistency: The characteristics of this character her personality or type, her physical description, where she lives, where she works, who are her friends and family right down to the kind of car she drives or doesn’t drive and the reasons she doesn’t. Without a profile, without some of the other devices for keeping your character notes straight, you may trip yourself up. Believability: Would this character say, do, react or behave in this manner as s/he’s been developed so far? Reliability: Again, you as an author can’t force a character who is terrified of snakes into a room full of snakes to pick up a quarter someone dropped in that room. That is an extremely ridiculous example, but you get the drift. Your characters are not checkers or chess pieces, you have breathed life into them – they are real. They will only behave in a certain way given the personality you have developed for them – or at least, should have developed for them. Think of your character building as CPR (CBR) for your character’s life. Keeping the details straight when you have two or more characters in your novel, is a challenge. Background information on them should also be charted. From the towns they live in complete with streets, stores, restaurants, places they frequent, or even go to once or twice during the course of the novel—your details need to be consistent throughout the story. Your time line of story history can easily become polluted by the time you trek across two hundred pages or more. You can take the hassle out of keeping these things straight if you jot them down as you go. You need to know who was privy to what information or you could easily have your sleuth solve a crime with clues he never had—your reader’s will remember. Slight of hand doesn’t work with your reader. The old formula – “if you bring a gun out in chapter one – it better have shot someone before the end of the story,” or your reader will lose faith in you. The same is true of the opposite. If the clue never showed up, then it can’t be used to solve the crime or conclude the book no matter what genre it is. If your character has green eyes in scene one, she better not have brown, or blue, or hazel anywhere else in the book unless it’s deliberately done with colored contact lenses as a planned disguise. If your character hoists a magnum to shot someone, she better know how to use it and have the strength, both physically and emotionally, to use it. To deliberately shoot someone takes a certain chutzpah. Not every personality type would be able to kill someone any more than a first time deer hunter can necessarily shoot the first deer she encounters. Human life would weigh much more heavily on a normal person’s conscience than an animal I would think, thus the emotional fortitude of someone that would shoot someone must be shown before hand. Trust me when I say, if you spend the time to develop your character fully before you begin your novel, you will have solved ninety percent of your problems before you start. The writing will be that much easier for it. Even your character’s name, as you will see, can have a profound impact on your story. In Careers for Your Characters, Raymond Obstfeld and Franz Neumann say, “To create realistic, well-developed characters, you have to write with authority. Careers…enables you to describe their professional lives with the accuracy and details of an insider. It covers such things as Professional jargon and buzz words, Educational requirements, salaries, benefits, perks, and expenses. Each profession’s average daily schedule is shown and how job reality differs from public perception of the job. Obstfeld and Neuman list publications and web sites for further research into your chosen profession. Patricia Cornwell’s novels use the career of forensic pathologist. Cornwell is intimately familiar with the profession and it shows in her work. Others such as James Patterson, Dean Koontz, and John Grisham rely heavily on careers that they were involved in before they became writers. I’m not saying you have to be in any one type of profession to write about it with authority, you only need to research thoroughly to add authenticity to your work. Creating Character Emotions, by Ann Hood gives the author an in depth look at showing instead of telling character actions and reactions. “Sweaty palms, butterflies in the stomach. Pacing back and forth, show your character being nervous,” she says. “…fresh images, words and gestures to evoke feelings in your fiction,” will set you apart from the novice. How do you show hate-love-fear-grief-guilt-hope-jealousy and other major emotions Hood provides some insight and answers of how you should put feelings into words? Take a quick check in your own vault of experiences. Think back to a time when you felt any of these emotions. Record what your physical manifestation of the emotion was at the time. This will give you a very accurate means for showing instead of telling. “Fiction’s traditional virtues—depth, empathy, intimacy…good writing must always be vivid, particular and surprising,” says Rand Richards Cooper. “To render character emotions is probably the most important information you can use as a fiction writer,” Hood says. Emotions affect every other element of fiction from dialogue and action to character development. Emotions lead us to more believable plot twists and turns, enhance dramatic tension, help illustrate themes and in short, they inform every aspect of our fiction. When a reader asks you “How did you know?” When you captured the essence of the emotion for them so exactly in one of your characters because you rendered the emotion so well, so effectively and honestly that your reader believed you had read their mind, or been where they had been. You can feel you have told the truth through your character, made him/her believable and worth the reader’s time and caring. The Writer’s Path by Todd Walton and Mindy Toomay will lead you through exercises in exploring fiction building that is worth the time. “Stories result from the action of characters. Put an interesting character in a dynamic situation, and you have the makings of a good story,” says Walton and Toomay. The raw material for your stories comes from your characters personal histories. Developing their backstory will show you their motivation and agenda if you pay attention as we have said before. By providing you with the bibliography, the forms I use when I begin a new novel, and information I’ve learned along the way I hope you will be able to skip the learning curve and jump into developing characters as large as life and novels that speak those truths that need to be told, if only to entertain and enlighten and hold your reader in your story’s embrace.
CHAPTER TWO BUILDING CHARACTER PROFILES THROUGH THE
ZODIAC
BASIC MEANINGS OF 12 SIGNS OF THE ZODIAC
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