Go on and tell me! How will you help them?
What advice will you give the newbie writer?
Go on and tell me! How will you help them?
What advice will you give the newbie writer?
Ask 3 questions:
Awesome! For a second there, I thought you were talking about the newbie writer. LOL!
Tell them that it’s okay for the character to develop and change, but remember that the core of their personality will always be the same. So, it’s important to choose at least one strong personality trait that is consistent no matter what happens in the story. Having more than one trait that never changes is preferable. But at least one strong trait that drives who that character is as a person should be present. It makes it easier to define and build off of the character later if you figure this out first, or at least early on when you are designing them.
I’d recommend K.M. Weiland’s books on character arcs
Oh and thematic principle. Build the character and the story around your thematic principle. All the best pieces of fiction do
There’s all sorts of things that will help make a more attractive character for your audience, but in general, the only thing I’d really like at is:
Their strengths are their weaknesses.
Their weaknesses are their strengths.
Hold onto that, and you have a chance of making a richer character.
I’d say:
—don’t copy anyone you like from the last anime you watched,
—learn about archetypes, drill down to the basics, then rebuild one as a character of your own
—improvise and record short banters between your characters and see if you can guess who speaks each line without seeing the name
I hate to ask, but you know a person who did this?
LOL!
Ooh, a fun question.
For any of these questions, it’s okay if you can’t answer them immediately. Feel free to return to them later, tweak your answers.
Whatever you dream up for your character’s past, try to focus on what’s relevant to the story. It’s easy to get carried away with the backstory so focus on the past that impacts the present. The best stories are made when the character has to overcome their own shortcomings, it’s when this particular type of person is thrown in the worst possible place for them. Contrast is your friend.
Ok. I got wordy. I guess I should leave it at that. It would be too much to give a newbie more.
Give them some motivations that you’ll never reveal directly. Make the reader wonder why they say or do certain things. Easily understood characters aren’t as memorable.
Also, resist the temptation to make your characters perfect in any way. Flaws are interesting. But don’t make them perfectly bad either since that’s just boring.
Just write it out and see what happens. Sometimes characters reveal themselves in ways you could have never planned.
Pretty much this. This would be my main advice.
You can plan a character as much as you want, paint them as how you want them. But writing and planning are so different. Characters grow and change just like we do. You can plan as much as you want but sometimes they change when you’re writing and that’s okay. In fact I love it when that happens.
My characters always take me on the journey with them and that’s what I love about writing.
It’s okay to take inspiration from anime though. Like yeah don’t copy but it’s alright to want to make another Akira or Dragon Ball Z, something that uses those characters as comps.
Not without drilling down to the archetype, imo. Each character in anime is basically a spin on an archetype, so my feeling is that the sooner someone new to writing learns to see it and customize for themselves, the better. That avoids a ‘just like, only their hair are green’ stage.
But if they already have a plot, I would tell them to reverse engineer the same process. Instead of looking at how a character would react, I would look at the reaction and then see what character trait made them make that choice.
Talk to your characters. (Role play, character interviews etc).
Try to avoid following arcs and stereotypes to the tee and if you are gonna use them, twist them a bit.
Make sure that your characters have personalities of their own. If you have two with similar personalities either change one or delete them.
Make character playlists. It helps a lot.
Look at real life people. See how they act. Get inspiration from them.
Do personality tests. Those are fun.
I guess I don’t want to discourage new writers from enjoying the things that they take inspiration from and from using those characters are comps. We all have to do archetypal work no matter where we get our ideas from, but it’s completely okay to write characters inspired by something that you enjoy, then doing the character work to make them your own. Sometimes characters start out with a ‘only my hair is green’ stage, but throughout the drafts they become their own people, especially as authors learn more about the craft of making characters. It’s okay for characters not to be fleshed out or original completely right out the gate, they’ll get there eventually. I just don’t like discouraging new writers from enjoying their comps and enjoying their work. Like hell if someone has a main character that is too much like an anime archetype but they are loving the process of making their first draft, then let them enjoy the damn thing, and allow them to discover their own original characters later in the process.
I’m giving the advice which I think is solid and helps avoiding pitfalls. If people want to know why, I can explain it. If they take it as discouragement… When threads like that pops up, I always see tons of ‘find your own way! Just keep writing!’ etc. well, they already have it, I don’t see the point of repeating it.
Some people need advice like mine. I know, I look for advice like that, not the ‘just do it your own way and enjoy’ kind.
This makes me uneasy. Like the whole people watching thing really makes me uneasy for some reason.
Fair enough but have you ever watched them from a distance? I go to a supermarket and it has an upstairs cafe and I used to get a coffee and look down at people and watch them from above. No one noticed me.