Tips and Tricks
Creating the Perfect Character
by
Sam Hackel-Butt
(Age: 19)
copyright 08-01-2005
Age Rating: 1 to 127
Creating the perfect character is crucial to your story’s success. Imagine your story like a television show. Without an exciting cast that the viewers can relate to, the show won’t continue for very long. I’ve decided to share what I do when I’m planning character(s) for story, both short and long.
The Questions Full name of Character:
Reason, meaning or purpose behind the name:
Nickname:
Reason for nickname:
Gender:
Race:
Occupation/class:
Social class:
Physical Appearance:
Age:
How old they appear:
Eye Color:
Glasses or contacts?:
Hair color, length and style:
Weight and height:
Build:
Skin tone and type (i.e., oily, fair, dark, tanned, burns easily):
Shape of face:
Distinguishing marks (dimples, moles, scars, birthmarks, etc.):
Predominant feature:
Hobbies:
Personality:
Are they a daredevil or cautious?:
Habits:
Greatest Strength:
Greatest Weakness:
Hometown:
Type of childhood:
Most important child hood event that still effects him/her:
Why?:
Education:
Religion:
Mother:
Relationship with her:
Father:
Relationship with him:
Siblings, ages and names:
Extremely skilled at:
Extremely unskilled at:
Good characteristics:
Character flaws:
How do they face problems:
Kind of problems they usually run into:
How they react to problems:
Friends:
Enemies:
Why?:
Also, it would be good to draw a sketch of your character to have an actual image to go upon. It doesn’t have to be a picture of the characters whole body, but a bust, to show skin color, hair and eye color, shape of the face, style of hair, and any distinguishing marks, if they are on the person’s face. Creating a whole bunch of well-rounded characters may seem time consuming, but it’ll be worth it in the end when you have the preliminaries done before you start writing, so your story has some direction. I’ll also write up a short thing on story development.
Help Us Stop Plagiarism -
Nearly all works at PnP are original. However a few people choose to plagiarize.
To check, choose a phrase from the work, then either drag and drop to the search box or copy and paste.
click on search and works at Google will be shown which match. Just to be sure, please do this before
you recommend or rate the work highly...
Konbanwa Sam! I was randomly browsing, and decided to read this...are you also going to do one of these for creating fictional worlds? I put Meh in complete wonder with all my countries, continents, races, wars, previous history of the countries, any clashing religions, climates, access to water, and so much more...I do all this with my characters, although I don't think I incorporate religion with my characters. It's easier to avoid faith in my stories, because I know a lot of my readers don't share my faith, but aside from that I enjoy doing all of this. I like to spread it out though, make sure their entire bio is known in the first few chapters if they're not supposed to mysterious. In my more recent works, I've been careful about giving outer appearance descriptions, but I love having mysterious characters with secrets. :) Take Niketa in FoF, she had one heckuva big secret...anyway, good work, keep writing! Hmm, by that "Age:" than "How old they appear:" I guess dudes like Vincent Valentine from Final Fantasy VII are more popular than I originally thought. :)
Welcome !
