Got Character?

Are you finding it hard to write and create characters in your story? You’re not alone.

Characters were one of the hardest hurdles for me to jump over before I began writing Prophecies Awakening. For years, the character process eluded me, and as a result I would find myself parked on writer’s block before I even got started.

Everyone has their own methods for doing this, but I will tell you what worked for me.

When I write, I have a movie-version of my story playing “live” in my head. Without a visual of the characters, it can leave you with a fuzzy image and blurred faces similar to Cops videos, but without all the terrible voice overs.

How do you overcome this?

What you do NOT want to do is to picture a character from a movie in your book, as this will lead you into writing a character that people will recognise from another work of fiction and you would be doing yourself a disservice.

For me, I began by making a list of the characters I knew would be in my book and then begin listing the attributes I want each character to have. For this example, I will use Kassina.

My first attempt would look something like this:

Kassina

(As you can see, the amazing artwork done by artist Nicola Mcintosh shows that I was able to capture and grow Kassina in words, and of course describe her in detail to Nicola. I found myself face-to-face with Kassina)

* Dangerous

* Sexy

* Tall

* Sorceress

* Vampire

* Captivating

So then, I begin what I call a “casting” process and begin sifting through my mind of someone that I would “cast” into that role.

In your mind, sift through the people you know including celebrities and find someone that you would cast. For Kassina, it could only be Angelina Jolie.

As you begin writing, you will become more familiar with the character and this will allow you to easily write scenes where you would be digging through your mind for answers on personality traits, physical appearance, etc. Strange and wonderful things will happen as your writing continues and you should not be afraid of it.

Your characters will form from this beginning into someone new and refined, and they will in many cases take control of your story. I will leave that particular discussion for another entry.

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