No. I don’t get out much and I am afraid I make it really awkward some how.
Still, most characters in fiction are based real life people and their experiences. I just don’t wanna come off as nosy or weird to people even from afar. I really need to change that.
Just observe, vs closely watch, you know? At meetings, on the bus, walking around… you will always catch the bits of conversations, scenes from their lives. If something catches your eye, think of them, wonder what their lives are, invent them.
One of my favourite things this winter was this scene I ran into while walking in a snow storm:
We were hit by a crazy spring snow-storm yesterday in Calgary. Our bus route has a traffic calming measure, a vehicle trap, so yesterday someone drove into it, stranding like six buses dead. I decided to hike through blowing snow, ankle deep, but I also got to see something awesome. There were a few of us daring the walk. So this construction worker, he took his outer jacket off, took a heavy hoodie he had underneath, then ran after a high-school student, dressed like the typical winter-unaware high students dress, and handed the sweatshirt over to her with the words, “I’m not going to take a no for an answer, you are taking it’”.
Or headlines. Sometimes headlines give you a hint of the story and character you can unearth… like ‘Man Caught At Border With 5 Thousand Leeches.’
As a writer, my mind is never idle around other humans, in person or virtually.
This is so arrogant! I’d much rather give real advice based on a craft resource than give advice based on my own biases that discourage rather than help, especially since I am not an expert nor am I qualified, which you are not either.
Is this gonna be a debate?
I hope so!
It’s based on my experiences. I don’t even attempt to pass it for anything else. Not some One True Way or anything. 
Peeps have a variety of advice to look at. If it’s all the same, then what’s the point of asking different people? I mean, what do you want, for me to revise my advice because you don’t agree with it? You already said so…
I’d say, just start with a basic idea and slowly build it up from there. For instance, I wanted a male baker who’s a single father, just trying to do best by his son, in one of my stories. From there, I kept adding on to his personality as I wrote the story. I took inspirations from real people, fictional characters I read about, true crime shows, and even anime! Character sheets can also be lifesavers! They really help you nail down what you need for your character. I’d even advise saving notes about your characters that might not be mentioned in the story. You don’t need to have your characters developed 100% in my opinion if it’s just the first draft. You’ve got many drafts to work on editing and adding new things in.
Ignore the read count the number of reads doesn’t correspond with your book being good or not.
I’ll raise your headlines for personal niche blogs.
There are times when I stumble upon a weird blog and I can totally feel the person writing it. The more passionate they are about the topic, the more their personality comes through.
I got to use it one time.
I’m not sure what I was researching but it led me to rock-piles.com, a site maintained by a self-proclaimed rock pile expert. For two decades already, this guy has traveled for hundreds of miles on a mission to discover rock piles across the region (literally, they’re rocks stacked on top of each other).
This is a new level of nerdiness that you just can’t make up. And you’re damn right I included rock piles in my story and I’m using a character inspired by the guy that wrote that blog as the guide that takes my characters to see the rock piles.
I’ve never even seen the guy. He doesn’t post pictures of himself, just the rocks, but that’s not a problem at all. If anything, it gives me a free reign to imagine him any way I want to.
I think it’s really helpful to recognize archetypes in real people because that later helps you when you’re writing. And using archetypes to build a character is a good way to
I like creating character sheets…anyone else? Lol
I don’t make character sheets. I just take notes of important things. Work the personality around that. Some character sheets can be too dry. And you sometimes don’t need half the things.
If times and dates are important in a story, I’ll keep a text file with everyone’s birthdates. This is especially useful in stories that jump ahead or back in time.
I don’t keep track of stuff like hair or eye color since I don’t think those things really matter. Weight and height can matter in some cases, but not just for the sake of describing it.
Mines more personality wise so I can keep it consist and believable!! I feel the more quirks they have (but not to exceed a few) the more the audience believes it’s a true character
I’m not sure if I’m suited to answer this since I need a lot of help myself haha, but I’ll try to add some nugget of insight — and I hope someone finds some sense in it.
I think a lot of newer writers gravitate a lot towards forming characters based on archetypes. And they’re able to create characters that are effortlessly interesting or relatable because as readers, archetypes are easily recognisable and there’s already some form of built-in fondness for recognisable characters. Having said that, it might make characters even more interesting to have a moment where they stray from the expectations tied to such archetypes earlier than later. This sounds very obvious but allow me to elaborate. I thought of this based on a comment on my story about something that I did but I didn’t actually consciously do. In one scene, one of my characters in her introduction chapter was set up to be very timid, gentle, overly anxious, and almost damsel-like. But when an eagle tried to catch/eat her cat, this character without hesitation attacked the eagle with a butter knife.
Someone said that they did not expect such a character to do something like that. It was surprising, out of character but not exactly out of character because the reader doesn’t reaaally know her character yet. She’s just being introduced. But this lays the ground for the character and what she’s capable of doing despite what her personality would lead you to believe at first glance. The possibility of being even more daring when push comes to shove. And I guess they liked it? Haha.
So my advice would be: definitely make use of archetypes. Draw from characters that people already know and love. But even in the first chapter they’re introduced, make them do something that you wouldn’t normally associate with that archetype. Something relatively small, but it’s an indication that this character has so much potential to breakaway from the readers’ expectations.
EDIT: omg I just read some of the posts above and people already discussed archetypes extensively. Oof. I hope I said something new and a little bit different from what was already said. 
If not, oh well, I’ll try and do better next time haha. 
I think that depending on the audience, having the characters be archetypal can work in your favor. Like when writing for kids, having your characters be immediately understandable is a good thing. Not to say that they can’t have depth, but deep psychological character studies will probably be too high-level for an audience who is just figuring out what the functions of the organs are.
And before anyone brings up Zuko-we are shown a lot more of his backstory and home life rather than being told. And overall, his character is fairly consistent and understandable. Still, my little brother bot had trouble understanding why he was such a jerk sometimes.
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