i’m curious about your process when it comes to writing and studying characters, what does it look like? what kind of questions do you ask? do you use things like 100 questions to ask your characters? :o
Oh. Ooog. Urgh… 😅😅😅
I’m sorry, anon, character writing is probably the only area of writing where we are unqualified to give advice to people.
“Have 25 different people in your head and use them as a "commedia dell’arte” style cast in everything you write" is probably not relevant advice for almost anyone…
Let me see if I can think of any habits we have that might be useful to you other than that…
When studying a character to write fanfiction
- take note of the character’s nervous ticks and habits, and backwards engineer why they might have those particular habits and ticks.
- Take the big elements of a character and consider what smaller things that they might apply to.
- These two ideas work in tandem. For instance, a character who canonically has a large family and a poor background might be intuited to eat their meals quickly and always accept food when it’s offered. In reverse, a character who is seen to eat their meals quickly and always accept food when its offered might be intuited to have a large family and a poor background.
When creating a new character
You can go one of two ways, either start big (with the plot stuff) or start small (with the personal stuff).
If you’re creating a character to fit inside a story you already have a plot and setting for, it’s better to start big. Figure out where the character fits into the plot, and then extrapolate down from that.
For instance, if you need a smarmy businessman character to fit into your cyberpunk dystopia, you probably want to first figure out who he works for, what level of power he has, and what major actions you need him to take in the story.
Then you work backwards. If he’s mid-level, is he striving to get higher? Is he a kiss ass or a schemer? If he’s a kiss ass, maybe he was an oldest child. If he’s a schemer, maybe he was an only child.
Use big details to figure out little details.
You can also go in reverse with this. If you create a character who dresses a certain way and has certain habits, figure out how those small things inform their larger influence on the plot.
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