Creating Characters for the Story (copied from TPO-6)
本帖最后由 天命圣骑 于 2011-10-2 10:02 编辑Alright everybody, the topic for today is, well, we’re gonna take a look at how to start creating the characters for the story you’re writing. One way of doing that is to come up with what’s called “a character sketch”, I don’t mean a sketch like a drawing, I guess that’s obvious. It’s um…it’s a…a sketch as a way of getting started on defining your characters’ personalities. To begin, how do we create fictional characters? We don’t just pull them from thin air, do we? I mean we don’t create them out of nothing. We base them, consciously or unconsciously, we base them on real people, or we blend several people’s traits, their attributes into one character. But when people think fiction, they may assume the characters come from the author’s imagination. But the writer’s imagination is influenced by… by real people, could be anyone, so, pay attention to the people you meet, someone in class, at the gym, that guy who is always sitting in the corner of the coffee house, um… your cousin, who’s always getting into dangerous situations. We’re pulling from reality, gathering bits and pieces of real people. You use these people, and the bits of behavior or characteristics as a starting point as you begin to sketch out your characters. Here is what you should think about doing first. When you begin to formulate a story, make a list of interesting people you know or have observed. Consider why they’re unique or annoying. Then make notes about their unusual or dominant attributes. As you create fictional characters, you’ll almost always combine characteristics from several different people on your list to form the identity and personality of just one character. Keeping this kind of character sketch can help you solidify your character’s personality, so that it remains consistent throughout your story. You need to define your characters, know their personalities so that you can have them acting in ways that are predictable, consistent with their personalities. Get to know them like a friend, you know your friends well enough to know how they’ll act in certain situations, right? Say you have three friends, their car runs out of gas on the highway. John gets upset. Mary remains calm. Teresa takes charge of handling the situation. And let’s say, both John and Mary defer to her leadership. They call you to explain what happen. And when John tells you he got mad, you’re not surprised, because he always gets frustrated when things go wrong. Then he tells you how Teresa took charge, calmed him down, assigned tasks for each person and got them on their way. Again, you’re not surprised. It’s exactly what you’d expect. Well, you need to know your characters, like you know your friends. If you know a lot about a person’s character, it’s easy to predict how they’ll behave. So if your character’s personalities are well defined, it will be easy for you as the writer to portray them realistically…er… believably, in any given situation. While writing character sketches, do think about details. Ask yourself questions, even if you don’t use the details in your story, um…what does each character like to eat, what setting does each prefer, the mountains, the city, what about educational background, their reactions to success or defeat, write it all down. But, here I need to warn you about a possible pitfall. Don’t make you character into a stereotype. Remember the reader needs to know how your character is different from other people who might fall in the same category. Maybe your character loves the mountains and has lived in a remote area for years. To make sure he is not a stereotype, ask yourself how he sees life differently from other people who live in that kind of setting. Be careful not to make him into the cliché of the “ragged mountain dweller”.Okay, now, I’ll throw out a little terminology. It’s easy stuff. Major characters are sometimes called “round characters”. Minor characters are sometimes called, well, just the opposite, “flat”. A round character is fully developed; a flat character isn’t, character development is fairly limited. The flat character tends to serve mainly as a motivating factor. For instance, you introduce a flat character who has experienced some sort of defeat. And then your round, your main character who loves success and loves to show off, comes and boasts about succeeding and jokes about the flat character’s defeat in front of others, humiliates the other guy. The flat character is introduced solely for the purpose of allowing the round character to show off. I just got this by chance when practising TOEFL listening. Useful for we designers. {:173:}indeed useful Good for you.Full of talent. 本帖最后由 天命圣骑 于 2011-10-2 19:26 编辑
回复 帝国银之风¤ 的帖子
Why not bring some more English articles here? This place seems deserted. Your job is not merely to walk around and keep people from speaking Chinese, is it? 本帖最后由 千骑卷平冈 于 2011-10-2 20:44 编辑
Well, I just recalled a course in philosophy I learned in senior two,which is mainly about the objectivity of sense. An instance ,illustrating the topic appropriately,talked that no matter how terrifying a ghost we creat looks like, it must either has face ,eyes or hands ,legs.....which are parts of our human alive.That's to say,the ghosts we made are always based on objective substances, but never generate out of nothing....just like character-creating in this article.
The pitfall "Don’t make you character into a stereotype",however,is another factor that really worth our concerns.maybe to stand out the character's personality except for its objectivity, I think.....
All in all,A quite useful article ,at least I've benefited from it a great deal! {:174:}
本帖最后由 天命圣骑 于 2011-10-2 23:44 编辑
Happy it works for you. Actually the fictional people in other stories, such as novels, TV shows, movies and even games are inspiring, too. And to broaden the topic, the plots of a story can also come from historical events. New worlds you design or new cultures you establish should not be built aloft, either.
Well, as to the so-call philosophy thing...huh, if you are interested, read more books and you'll find it just an assumption, not a truth. Well of course, I might have better clarify that IMO that assumption does work, usually. 本帖最后由 ☆啟人→Takato 于 2011-10-3 10:52 编辑
i don‘t understand。。。
just come to see big zhi
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