Writing Tips: How to Write Amazing Characters

guys this is Debian for this episode of ratalie Wednesday's I'm going to talk about writing awesome characters now we all know writing on a novel is really hard that's just a fact period if it was easy everybody would do it not only do you have to build your characters and figure out who they are but you're also building an entire world a whole plot there's so many different things that are going on that you have to figure out how to do and it's hard but I think a big thing that really helps with writing great stories is your characters your characters are really important element in your stories because bad characters can make a bad story just like great characters can make a great story so they influence the quality of your work lot so first off what makes up an awesome character in your story arc you'll have a character who has a problem they'll have some fear or flaw that impedes their progress with that problem and then at the end they either triumph or fail over some problem so generally you don't want your characters to be jerks you want them to be likeable or actually you want them to be relatable say you're writing about a character who has a million tattoos all over his body and as a reader you might think I don't believe in marking your body and this guy is an idiot because he's gonna look like a creep when he is 80 years old with tattoos all over his body whatever the case may be you might build these prejudices against him based on the simple fact that he has tattoos how can he make him relatable well maybe you reveal that he tattoos his body as a way of covering up scars that he got from a horrific accident and he feels empowered every time he gets a new tattoo to cover those scars that character is far more relatable than just a guy with a bunch of tattoos so it's very very important to always try to find a way to make your characters relatable so if you want other people to think that your characters are real people then you're the one that needs to start thinking of them as real people during your writing process how do you go about building real characters one thing a lot of people like to date is people watch you can pick up a lot of character traits from just watching other people and little quirks that people have you can look at your coworkers and kind of analyze them and see what are their flaws what are some funny things that they do that maybe you can use in your story now I'm not saying that you should base your characters off of people in your real life but you can get some good ideas and more importantly this helps kind of solidify one specific thing the fact that nobody is perfect everybody has flaws everyone so if you're trying to write a book with a bunch of perfect people in it nobody's gonna think your characters are relatable because they can do no wrong therefore what's the problem in the story how much character plotting is too much though my answer to this is you can't have too much I mean you can but this is one thing that you have to figure out for yourself if there's just this one character in your story that you don't feel particularly bonded to then take the time to get to know that character a little bit more to get to know the motivations in the storyline or the big piece of internal conflict that they have now there's a few fun ways that I go about getting to know my characters and getting to the point where I can think of them as actual people so the first step is Pinterest boards now I have been in the process of making Pinterest boards for all of my characters and I'll leave a link in the description box below so you guys can go check that out right now but basically I try to get into the mind of whatever character I'm analyzing and for example one of my characters her name is Cora and she is the main characters best friend she is like a badass chick she colors her hair all the time guides different colors every few weeks she doesn't get tattoos but she listen to her music really loud she was crazy close and she just generally doesn't care what people think about her I get into my characters mind and I just search for things that I think she would like I've pinned different colored hairstyles or different outrageous clothes in different kinds of fashions or what her bed what I think her bedroom looks like what she would like to eat because Cora is a vegan different things like that so I have a Pinterest board in real life I want my characters to have a Pinterest board too and it's a really fun way to kind of get to know who your characters are another fun thing you can do is have playlists now I use Spotify for this but you can use I guess whatever you know music platform you like but basically I pick a genre of music I think my character will like and I put it in their little radio so I get a different variety of music and then I'll just favorite whichever one I particularly like and then put it into their playlist later my boyfriend actually laughs about this one because I will be in the car and I'll be like oh this is chorus song and I'm talking about my character like she actually exists and she's like my friend because she is just like my imaginary friend but we're writers we can get away with that without being locked up so another fun thing that I like doing is doing backstories for my characters so I pick a any character whatever character I want to do and then jump to seeing their life that has nothing to do with the plot that I'm currently writing about I just want to get to know their past a little better so I actually posted one of these on my blog and I'll put a link in the description box below and the one that I did was basically my main character's parents and the story about how they met when they were teenagers now this might end up my story I'm not sure but it really helps me to get a better idea of who I'm writing for so the parents don't really appear much in my story but I still wanted to give them the time and get to them know them a little better by hearing their love story you can literally write about any story that you want to write about so if you have a character who's really funny and your stories maybe you can write about why they need something funny in their life for how they use humor as a shield for something anything like that you can talk about how your characters best friend got their first puppy I mean it can be whatever you want it to be just something important to that character and you never know it could crop up later in your story and have some significance last big thing that I like to do is character sketches now I don't really like to do this one this one's more because I know I need it it's still fun because you get to know your characters but it's not as fun as you know Pinterest as Pinterest is awesome but this is when you ask all of the questions you could ever possibly think of to ask a single person in the world you want to know their whole backstory what they're afraid of what they're bad at with a really good at their favorite car the car that they drive everything you want to nail down everything about your character because you never know if it's gonna come up or it just helps in general to get an idea of who your character is in addition if you have something come up and say your main character knows about every single dog breed in the world but then later on she's like oh what's a Labradoodle that's not consistent so it also helps to maintain consistency for your characters if your character has red hair at the beginning of the book don't make them have blonde hair without saying that they colored their hair or something another common bump in the road that people have is how to make your characters different now I think that you need to do this process or most of your large characters including your supporting characters but then if you're sitting there mapping out ten different people you might get a little confused how to keep them unique to themselves how do you do this you give the character different traits now that sounds like a no-brainer and you probably like Vivien that's stupid I know that already so this is where you can have your characters have different voices and I don't just mean in the you know the accent that they speak in which is also a really good idea but I also mean in their favorite words that they use you can label reaction phrases for each of your characters so one character something might happen right in front of them and they'll say oh my god and then the next character might say shoot or whatever the case may be so this also helps differentiate between your characters when you have rapid scenes of dialogue so I think a really good example of this is link from the beautiful creature series he has his own totally unique voice you don't need any tags to know who's saying what because link is always the one saying those goofy phrases because the link is a link he's not like any of the other characters and that's a good thing that's what you want to strive for so I just think utilizing different voices is a huge way to make all of your characters seem slightly different from one another one character might use larger words than the other characters or one person might speak a little more formally or another one might speak in more shorthand utilize all these things so that as a reader you don't feel confused about what character is saying what another really big question that people have is what descriptions they should use and when for their characters now there's big debate about oh you shouldn't put a description of your character in the beginning of the book or that you should do it right away but I'm kind of in the middle I think that we should immediately get some tidbits of physical description about your main character immediately you don't have to delve into everybody's description right away but your main character I think your reader should be able to visualize that person by like chapter 3 so fairly early on I should know basically their eye color hair color body type or anything else significant about their physical appearance I think the way that that should be done is by sprinkling tidbits in the beginning of the story but doing them as organically as possible and what I mean by that is don't just pause your story while you go on a paragraph long rant about what your character looks like found at the freckle I don't think anybody should do that an example of this one is from divergent the opening scene where Tris gets her hair cut we get choices physical appearance from this description but it relates to the flow of a story she sees herself for the first time a year she's getting her hair cut she's preparing for a huge rite of passage in their society and she sees her reflection she's reflecting on herself and that scene is a great example of not forcing a character description on your readers and a rather interesting piece of advice that I have for people is in regards to introducing your supporting characters and I remember where I read this but I think it's excellent advice introduce your characters more than once and what I mean by this is have your character show up in a tiny tiny scene at the beginning of the book and then later on when that character becomes relevant to the story the reader already feels in some way that they're connected to that character they already feel like they've had a tiny introduction to them and they have some interest in finding out who they are so for example you have a main character John he's getting off of an elevator and when he does he bumps into this woman and and I feel were two doors close she gives this maniacal laugh to John so he thinks it's weird but he moves on whatever days later he might find out that that was his best friend's aunt and that she is the prime suspect in a murder investigation that took place that morning so we got that tiny little glimpse into the crazy aunts character and it makes you feel more connected to the story and like the story has more depth to it just with one easy trick I know I'm like throwing examples that you guys left and right but think of Harry Potter for this we are introduced to so many characters throughout the first Harry Potter book the second one who don't really become big players until books later but we already felt like we sort of knew them at some point now my last piece of advice might go against everything that we've talked about in this video but I am giving you permission to write forgettable characters now going off of what I just said about Harry Potter there's a lot of characters in there and you might have kind of forgotten about some until they came up in later books and had larger roles now you don't want to write a book and have 20 major characters and delve into all of their pasts and all their fears and everything that we've just talked about establishing because it's just going to be an overload to your reader so you want to take your core characters and figure out who they are so say you have a gas station clerk you don't want to spill off into a three-page description of that character's life unless not going to have meaning at some point if they don't come back and like blow up their place of work or something then get rid of it cut it out cut that whole scene you don't need it if the character is giving something to the story you want to give time to that character if they in some way affect your storyline that's when you need to get to know them the gas station clerk if they're not going to do anything other than give you your change back you don't need to give them the time of the day now if you're writing a series you might have time to go back on these characters like in Harry Potter and delve into their stories a little bit more then people just fall in love even more with your stories but other than that only focus on your important characters all right so I hope you guys enjoyed my ratalie Wednesday video I haven't quite decided what next week's video is gonna be about so if you have any suggestions please comment in the comment section down below and let me know and I am by no means B be-all end-all of this topic so if you have any suggestions for me personally let me know what they I okay bye guys you

Channel: Vivien Reis

Views: 88,872

Rating: 4.9498119 out of 5

Keywords: Writing (Interest), Book, Reading, How-to (Website Category), Help, Books, How to write a book

Id: erNBfnCfZ9s

Length: 13min 15sec (795 seconds)

Published: Wed Oct 28 2015