• Creating Characters Without Inspiration

  • Author bio: Jake Anderson is a high-school blogger who is well-known for his partying lifestyle and his passions for football. After getting into a starting lineup he formulated a habit to exercise 6 times a week and ask “Programming Help” to only one website.

    There are two ways of creating a characters for a story line. It can be either a spontaneous and intuitive search of ideas, or it can be a form of more analytical thinking that implies a usage of specific guideline. The beauty about the last one, is that it requires no inspiration. If you got stuck or you want to go full throttle with your inspiration, the following technique may serve you as a the alternative. It is divided in two main steps.

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1. Select the main field of your future character

If you were asked to name 40 words, you would probably have no difficulties in saying first 10. But shortly you would start to run out of ideas. The same struggle would happen if you were interviewed by a person who asked you to tell something interesting. Whether, you play “40 words”, or having an interview with unprofessional journalist, or creating characters your life will be a lot more easy if you start with selecting a keyword topic for your ideas.

Let’s use Walter White (the main character of Breaking Bad), as an example. Theoretically his origins could’ve been started with selecting a word “school” by director of the show Vince Gilligan. If we use “school” as a starting point, our imagination will instantaneously receive an array of numerous associations with anything related to school, than will serve us as a great material. All we will have left to do is to differentiate these associations and select the one’s we want to try out.

A character can be any person from a curious first-grader to an unhappy principle. But depending on a degree of craziness of our story, the character can even be a description of the missing child on the side of the school milk. And that is a perfect example of the idea that would unlikely be formulated out of the blue without selecting a guiding detailing keyword in advance.

2. Classify your character

Adding a set of interesting characteristics to a fictional person can be as challenging as any other aspect of creative process of writing. But it is not the case when you have a go-to protocol you can always rely on, if you’re having difficulties and see the personality and features of your character too vague.

This technique represents a form that you can fill according to your preferences. It can be a simple SWOT analysis. But if you want to go deep with your characters and have a better and detailed picture of them for yourself, you can add into the form a bunch of peculiar sections. Such as “appearance distinctive features”, “reputation”, “degree of importance in the story line” “secrets”, “dreams”, “motivation”, “health”, “financial position”, etc. You don’t have to fill every field in the questionnaire. But depending on the genre and story line you work on, it is good idea to adjust it with different questions.

Any great action hero has an ability to successfully use the nearby objects during the fight scenes. But useful items may not always be there for him. Therefore, if you don’t want to depend on inspiration as much as the action hero depends on luck, feel free to use the aforementioned guideline.