Character Development

Hello all! Today’s post is all about developing characters, whether they are elves, humans, trolls, or anything else. I’m not an expert, but I have picked up a few tricks along my writing journey, so now I’d like to share those with you today!

First off, it’s helpful to know what your character looks like. For example, it must be decided if their skinny, fat, muscular, average, or anything in between. Height, eye and hair color, and the presence (or absence) of glasses, freckles, jewelry, and weapons. Going on Google or Pinterest to look for outfits is also extremely helpful. You can even look up hair types and eye colors for your character.Once you have your character’s look, the voice and personality come next. There’s no specific order for these two. Sometimes the voice is based on the personality, and sometimes the voice indicates things about the personality. Regardless of what order you go in, there are several great sources for figuring out your character’s personality. Taking personality tests online for your character is extremely helpful. https://www.16personalities.com is my favorite resource, but there are other websites for personality tests that are also good quality. It may take a minute for you to really feel like the answers are for your character, but the test doesn’t take a lot of time so it should be easy to take several until you know it’s all for your character rather than yourself.

Knowing your character’s personality is always a massive help in writing. It helps you to know what they would most likely do in a given situation. Even the basic knowledge of whether your character is an introvert or an extrovert is very valuable.

Speaking of different situations, one great exercise is to have a friend or family member give you a random situation for you to put your character in. The goal would be to have your character act, well, in character, for the scene in the form of a short story or flash fiction. You can scrap it afterwards, no need to perfect it, but it does help in discovering your character. Maybe in the exercise they got a mini dragon who became their constant companion, even though you didn’t have one before. Maybe you like that idea and he/she will have the dragon in their story, and maybe that was just a fun temporary thing that doesn’t carry over.

When writing fantasy, one of the beautiful things is that you can create your own rules, making the possibilities endless. While this may be daunting at first, there’s only so much that can properly go into a story without expanding it or making it seem too full. But this means your character is completely yours to create, with no restrictions except those you place yourself. No matter what your characters end up as, I hope it is always a fun process to create them! Feel free to leave your thoughts in the comments of things I missed, or anything you’d like to expand on. Your own advice is also greatly appreciated! Happy creating!