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NaNoWriMo: How I Create Characters
Creating characters for National Novel Writing Month can either be a confusing endeavour or something that I indulge in and forget about the world around me. These are some of the ways I go about creating my characters for my novels.
1. Notes and character sketches.
Whilst I like to have comprehensive character profiles for my characters, the first glimpses of them don’t come to me fully formed. Through day dreaming, conversations, movies, books or whatever, thoughts and elements to characters can appear to me at random.
I’ll often store these newly found thoughts and facts inside my head, or if I’m really organised, write them in down in the couple of notebooks I have with me to jot down such notes. Whilst I often kick myself for forgetting bits that I haven’t written down, I think it might be a way of getting rid of the ideas that don’t quite fit as often other ideas are much stronger, bug me, and are impossible to forget.
What I’ve then done this time around is to store up these thoughts and ideas and write freely about each character in a stream-of-consciousness type thing, writing everything I know about the character, part of their story line, their relationships with other characters and seriously any fact, no matter how inane.
2. Creating Character Models on Sims 3
Any excuse to fit a game or some other ‘fun’ thing into my writing.
Creating a Sim in the game, Sims 3, is so detailed that it’s astounding, from picking clothes and hair styles right down to the shapes of the various facial elements. You could seriously waste a lot of time tweaking and creating characters, but despite the obvious avenue for procrastination, I find this a great way to visualise my characters.
It’s true that physical appearance of your characters isn’t the chief concern for making realistic characters, but being able to see these people in my day dreams of what they do really seems to help me, personally. Also, the kinds of clothes they wear can reflect their personality as well as how they look can affect how other characters see them even if this is a right or wrong perception.
If you don’t have Sims 3, I’ve also used the South Park Create-a-Character flash game.
3. Chatting as your character
Everyone does profiles, asks the usual questions and answers generic questions from some quiz. I plan on getting to that too. But last year, I wanted people to throw my characters curve balls. So I entered the NaNoWriMo chatroom as my main character.
I’m not sure of the ethics and effectiveness of chatting with people in the chatroom either knowing or not knowing I’m a fictional character, but last year when I attempted it, I told people at the start. Perhaps it would be interesting trying it without giving it away. It would mean people were less likely to ask predictable questions.
There is also the issue of suspension of disbelief. You’re really not going to convince anyone that you’re really from the 12th Century so not outing yourself as fictional really only works if you’re character fits into today’s world pretty neatly.
Would love to hear people’s thoughts on this. And their experiences if they’ve tried it themselves.
4. Character Profiles
There are millions available to writers everywhere through the portal of Google and they all vary, and include ones for all kinds of genres.
I think the fields in a Facebook profile work pretty good as a guide, but of course work better for character’s where Facebook or social networking exists in their world.
Holly Lisle’s The Character workshop also has a list of interesting questions for you to answer about your characters.
Those are some of the key ways I go about creating my characters for NaNoWriMo. I’m sure there are others but I can’t remember them at the moment. Feel free to add your own original or slightly odd ways of creating characters in the comments section. I’d love to hear them.
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Interesting! Most people I know sit down and build their characters from the ground up, hashing out every little detail before they start writing. I like your method though, especially the Sims method!
I prefer to let them build themselves. At their introduction into the story I already have an image of what they look like in my head, but everything else about them kind of morphs as the story demands.
I’m still jealous of that MacBook. Expensive yes, but when I look at a similarly equipped Windows laptop (software wise) I find I’ll spend pretty much the same. What size is yours?
John Pender´s last blog ..Year One’s Braselton Bash
And do you know how in the world I add my picture to the avatar placemarker in my responses?
John Pender´s last blog ..Year One’s Braselton Bash
I do your method for shorter works, but I like to know lots of backstory before taking characters into novels.
The MacBook is great. Well worth it for the extra cost. it’s a 2.53ghz processor, with 250gb HDD and 4gb of RAM, oh and this nice and tiny 13″ screen.
The add the avatar, go to Gravatar.com and register. It will then work with other Gravatar-enabled blogs also.
Ahh, Sims 3! I’ve tried that in Sims 2 before and would in Sims 3 if it wasn’t sitting all depressed in the box since not one pc in my house can handle it. Where was I?
Great list, I really like the idea of acting out your character and not telling anyone. Especially if you were some mythological creature.
I’ve printed out a bunch of profiles and have used them but daydreaming about my characters and writing down snippets about them is what I do the most.
I’ve only come up with my genre(s) today – I’m greedy – so I should have a character worker out by… Oooh… I’m guessing the first of November would be a fair estimate. At least it’ll stop me starting work on the story before the beginning of next month. Maybe I ought to start on that sometime soon…
Sorry to say this, but I’ve never been overly enamored with The Sims. All the awful 1st generation variants and rip-offs completely ruined the experience. Try playing all those games for a few weeks and see if you have any urge whatsoever to return to the franchise.
Awesome MacBook, but I don’t think I would be able to remain as enthusiastic about it with a mere 13″ screen. I’ve been spoiled by big monitors, and using my television as a monitor has really screwed up my patience for small screens. If you haven’t played Left4Dead on a 48″ screen you haven’t lived.
BigWords88´s last blog ..My NaNoWriMo Novel Is A SF… And A Horror… And A Thriller… And…
My characters simply walk on stage and do their thing. After that it is a struggle to keep up with them.
Rafael´s last blog ..October Blog Chain: Ends and Beginnings
I’ve always wanted a program that allowed me to build a visual of my characters. That’s a great idea! Good luck with NaNo this year.
Deborah Woehr´s last blog ..Creative Frenzy
[...] Tools for NaNoWriMo from Learn to Write Fiction NaNoWriMo: How I Create Characters Benjamin Solah has got some great posts on how he prepares for NaNoWriMo, but my favorite so far is [...]
Thanks for comments and encouragement guys.
BigWords: I don’t much play the game and got pretty bored of it after playing it for months non-stop.
And you can’t carry a 48″ screen around on your back…unless you want to break it