Character creation, how?

[nonesane]

How do you create the characters for your stories? I'm really curious, since so far I've seen quite different descriptions of the inhabitants of other authors' works from the way I usually talk about my main and side characters. For one, there has been way more pictures and physical descriptions, both of clothes and facial features/body type

Comments

[naoki_hime]

I can't speak for anyone else, of course, but in my case, most of my writing involves roleplay characters. Roz and Tahmik were OCs in another rp that never took off, with different names. Roz in particular is a very... personal character to me, somehow - he's not exactly a vocal muse, but he's very distinct. Malkinim is a more recent development, and he came out of a need for a character to play to Tahmik and Roz's weakness - a physical fighter rather than a mage. He's ended up with his own distinct story and characterization, though, and twisted himself into the main part of the story. Physically, I just had a vague idea of them all aside from Roz, and I just recognized it when I saw it. To make up the photos I had, I collected them for a while. I've got a whole set of folders and subfolders to do with them; costumes and appearances and settings and objects.

[naoki_hime]

Also, maybe it's got something to do with it, but I 'see' scenes in my head with a line or two and write about them. So I think it's a more visual idea of my story - I think of it and my characters and plots in terms of an old-school rpg videogame, like a Final Fantasy, the ones that take after visual novels.

[nonesane]

I've written the occasional story about a rp-character, which usually helps a lot when it comes to the visual part - though usually they've been drawn by someone else prior to me writing something about them.

I have very little interest in clothes, so while I can research almost any random facts about my fantasy words to death, clothing is the one I tend to avoid like the plague - partly because I get bored and partly because when I actually find something that interests me, I'm doomed to copy it right off, as I have no clothing-related imagination.

As for facial features, I tend to just throw stuff together and make sure not too many people get the same eye colors and face shapes... A few things I see clearly, if they're important to the plot (like the main characters' scars in my NaNo), but otherwise they might get clearer as I go along, or may just remain faceless voices with motivations.

My brain works differently than most authors I know, I guess :)