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Resource Dump: Creating Characters!

Primary Characters

Your Hero: Top Ten Rules

10 Traits of a Great Protagonist

4 Steps to Creating a Truly Active Protagonist

20 Tips for Creating Relatable Protagonists

How to Center your Story

How to Create Unforgettable Protagonists

25 Things You Should Know About Protagonists

Creating Memorable Characters

Creating Strong Female Protagonists

Creating Dynamic Protagonists

How to Create Characters

Inner Dialogue - Writing Inner Character Thoughts

25 Things a Great Character Needs

5 Ways to Create 3D Characters

Secondary Characters

10 Secrets to Creating Unforgettable Supporting Characters

How to Write Effective Supporting Characters

Question to Ask (& Strengthen) Your Minor Characters

5 Tips for Developing Supporting Characters

Techniques for Creating Great Secondary Characters

5 Steps to Dazzling Minor Characters

3 Ways to Create Stupendous Supporting Characters

Creating Memorable Secondary Characters

5 Archetypes for Supporting Characters

Your Map to Creating a Memorable Minor Characters

Names

Top Ten Tips

8 Tips for Naming Characters

7 Rules of Naming Fictional Characters

Name that Character!

6 Creative Ways to Name your Character

Naming your Characters

A Guide to Naming Characters

Female: 1 | 2 | 3

Male: 1 | 2 | 3

Alien: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5

Surname: 1 | 2 | 3 

Unisex: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4

Traits

List: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9

Developing Character Traits

How to Create Good Personalities for your Characters

Develop Memorable Personalities

Give your Character Personality

How to Create a Character’s Personality

How to Make Sure your Character’s Personality Shines

5 Building Blocks of your Character’s Personality

Appearance

Appearance Generator

Your Character’s Physical Appearance

How to Describe a Character’s Looks

Describing a Character’s Appearance

Character Description Resource

Examples of Physical Characteristics

Describing the Physical Attributes of your Characters

How Great Authors Describe Character Appearance

Ultimate Guide to Nailing your Character’s Appearance

Describing Clothing and Appearance

Character Appearance Help

Character Description Resource

Describing People: A Person’s Physical Appearance

Describing the Physical Attributes of Characters

Speech

Talking About your Character: Speech

Variety in Character Voices

All your Characters Talk the Same

How to Create Distinctive Character Voices

How to Create Characters Who Don’t Sound like You

The Art of Voice in Fiction

Create Varying, Yet Realistic, Speech Patterns

The Art and Craft of Dialogue

Writing Character Voice

Creating Differences in the Speech Patterns of your Characters

Style: Person and Speech

Dialects: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6

Backstory

Building Better Backstories

Basic Tips to Create Better Characters with Tragic Backstories

How to Write a Backstory

Writing Characters Using Conflict and Backstory

Backstory Description Generator

Questions to Create Character Backstory

How to Weave in Backstory to Reveal Character

Nail your Character’s Backstory

How to Write Backstory Without Putting your Reader to Sleep

How to Write a Killer Backstory

Diversity

How to Make Young Adult Fiction More Diverse

Writing People of Color

A Few Tips and Resources for Writing Characters of Colour

Writing Characters of Colour Tastefully

Writing With Colour

7 Offensive Mistakes Well-Intentioned Writers Make

Writing Characters of Colour

Describing Characters of Colour

Gender

Female: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5

Male: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5

Transgender: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6

Non-Binary: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5

Sexuality

Main Character Sexuality

On Writing LGBTQ Characters: 1 | 2

Writing Gay Characters

Guide to LGBT YA

Avoiding LGBTQ Stereotypes

Writing Bisexual Characters: 1 | 2

Writing Asexual Characters: 1 | 2

Pansexual & Demisexual Characters

How to Write Gay, Bisexual and Pansexual Characters

Introduction

Introducing a Character

Introducing your Main Character

Do’s and Don’ts for Introducing your Protagonist

First Impressions

How to Introduce a Character

How Not to Introduce a Main Character

Introducing the Protagonist

Development

Character Development

9 Ingredients of Character Development

Characterisation 1 - Character Development

How to Develop a Character for a Story

Character Development

Character Development Drives Conflict

Developing your Characters and Making them Interesting

Relationships

How to Write Strong Character Relationships

Character Relationships

3 Keys to Developing Character Relationships

The Secret Behind Great Character Relationships

3 Tips for Character Relationships

Building Believable Relationships

Sibling: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4

Platonic: 1 | 2 | 3

Romantic: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6

Strengths

Identifying your Character’s Strengths

Character Strengths and Weaknesses

Introducing the 24 Character Strengths

Character Strengths and Virtues List

Strengths and Weaknesses

A Balance of Strengths

Flaws

123 Ideas for Character Flaws

DarkWorld RPG Flaws List

Character Flaws

Ten Ugliest Character Flaws

The Four Types of Character Flaws

On Giving Flaws and Weaknesses

Character Flaw Index

Goal

Why your Character’s Goal Needs to be 1 of these 5 Things

Goals Define the Plot

Goal Setting for You and your Character

How to Explore you Character’s Motivation

4 Ways to Motivate Character and Plot

Motivation

By Genre

Fantasy: 1 | 2 | 3

Sci-Fi: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4

Romance: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4

Thrillers: 1 | 2 

Horror: 1 | 2 | 3

Heroes

Your Hero: Top Ten Rules

How to Write your Own Hero Story

What Makes a Great Hero?

Creating Heroes and Heroines

Write a Story about a Hero

How to Create an Antihero that Readers Love

Heroes vs. Anti-Heroes

Create a Super Hero

How to Create a Brand New Iconic Hero or Villain

What Makes a Hero

Villains

How to Create a Credible Villain in Fiction

How to Make a Purely Evil Villain Interesting

9 Evil Examples of the Villain Archetype

How Not to Create a Villain

Creating Villains People Love to Hate

3 Techniques for Crafting a Better Villain

Basic Tips to Write Better & More Despicable Villains

Writing Tips for Creating a Complex Villain

How to Create a Great Villain

Do’s & Don’ts

Do’s and Dont’s of Writing a Good Character

How to Create a Character

Characterisation Dos and Dont’s

Female Characters of Do’s and Dont’s

Do’s and Dont’s of Dialect

Helpful Writing Blogs

fuckyeahcharacterdevelopment*

writeworld

referenceforwriters

thewritingcafe

aquestionofcharacter *

writingwithcolor

fuckyeah-char-dev

dailycharacterdevelopment

Clichés

Characters and Cliches

Top 10 Character Cliches

7 Lazy Character Cliches 

10 Most Cliched Characters in Sci-Fi

Four Worst Character Cliches

Female Character Cliches

Character Cliches to Avoid

The Cliche Character Test

How Cliches Can Help You Make Great Characters

Templates

How to Create a Character Profile

Writing Character Bios

Character Sheets and Character Creation

Gender/Sexuality Generator

Extremely Detailed Character Template

Writer’s Resource: Character Template

Character Description

Character Ideas:

Character creation masterpost

Character Alignment Chart

More character alignment descriptions

Muslim Character questions

Characters with magical powers

Building a new character advice

How to create a character for an online or tabletop RPG (also a good guide on creating characters in general)

Royalty/nobility TV Tropes page

Basic character profile

OC masterpost

Random character generators - (1), (2), (3), (4)

D&D Character Building Tool

Character Design Ideas:

How clothing affects a character’s personality

Character Design Inspiration blog

Concept art, fan art, cool art to be inspired by

Character design references and inspiration

Sources for POC character design ideas and models

Create your own character model using HeroForge

For horned characters

Body and hair types guide

Random outfit generator

Naming Help:

Amazing site with an endless amount of naming resources

General advice on avoiding naming appropriation

Hispanic Surnames

Gothic Victorian names

Huge master list for character things in general

Masterlist of names of all types - including but not limited to ancient/old world names, Celtic, African, Northern European, Southern and Central American Native names, Japanese, Chinese, Mongolian, Polynesian, and more

Another name masterlist

How to pick a character name guide

Yet another names masterlist

Creating Background/backstory:

Character Sheet/Development Sheet

Another character development list

In-depth character personality, motivations and traits sheet

320 talents and passions for characters

On writing likes and dislikes that aren’t frivolous

Why you should write non-human characters non-conforming to the gender binary

Stereotypes, tropes, and archetypes

Random backstory generator

Assassin and thief character tropes to avoid

Character Interactions and putting your character into your world/story:

Comparing character height/height references

Characters who are scientists and writing about them doing science

Describing what different voices sound like

Describing skin tones

Writing friendship interactions that are platonic

Why having one character knock their friend unconscious to prevent them from doing something is a bad idea

Advice on shipping OCs with canon characters and what to avoid doing

Sweet Polly Oliver and Sweet on Polly Oliver situations (think of Disney’s Mulan for an example)

How to write multiple viewpoints/juggling a main cast of more than 4 to 6 characters

How to make readers care about your morally gray hero/anti-hero

On platonic OC and canon character relationships

How to avoid Godmodding in RPs

When it’s cheap to kill off a character

Writing dialogue

Things you shouldn’t do to canon characters

Avoiding purple prose in writing and RPs

Slang resources

Dialogue tips

Websites to chart your story/plot/character relationships

How to Improve your writing

This is something that happens every day in your life. A shift of your eyebrow in skepticism, or the way your lip may twitch to a half smile cause you’re trying not to laugh. These behaviors are vital for writing in character, because not only do the allow you to visually see what is happening but it is also reaffirming whatever emotion your character is showing.

So why should you write it?

Much of human communication is non-verbal which means you need to also translate this non-verbal reaction in a post. It allows you to greatly enhance the emotions of another character and always another person to ‘visually’ see how they feel in a post. Most of all, this will add depth and volume to your post to make it feel more real. IT will make your character feel like a human instead of just another fictional person you look at from above.

Below you will find a list different type of emotions and what sort of body language can be exhibited to them.

Three ways to accent an action.

When writing about emotions, there are different ways to verbally write them out. Each one is unique in their own way, allowing you to show more about the emotion.

Emphasize the Emotion. But doing this, you are expressing both the emotion and the body language. We’ll use a simple example. It’s short and simple yet you can sense he is happy. John felt so happy that he was humming a tune while walking down the hall.

Complicate the Emotion. Sometimes, even when you are feeling one emotion, deep down rooted underneath the facade of it all, there is actually an underlining emotion they feel. This is something you have to truly express otherwise no one will know. John felt so happy that he was humming a tune while walking down the hall. However, it was obvious by the way his nose crinkled that he was disgusted by the actions beforehand. Instead, John covered it up by appearing pleased today.

Contradict the Emotion. This is a little different than complicate. Contradicting means that you are claiming one thing when in fact its the other. In many ways, this has a variety of uses, from inner depth of the truth to what you see in person, or someone creating a wall. It could be considered a lie, but when is anything that easy? John felt so happy that he was humming a tune while walking down the hall. In truth, once he was in the classroom, his shoulders slumped and a pout crossed his lips when no one was around, showing just how displeased he was with the situation.

Remember that you do not always have to contradict or complicate anything. Sometimes all you need to do is emphasize and that will be just fine. You don’t always have to have an underlining complicated for an emotion to make it more enhanced.

Do be afraid to use the Thesaurus to also improve an emotion. Such things as “happy” is a nice emotional word, but think of how much more powerful it is when you heard some is “overjoyed” or “content.” She how these emotions matched up with a body language can give two different styles of happiness? Mix and match to find what works best for your character at the time.

More In Depth Information

What I’ve stated above is more of a simplistic overview. IF you truly want to improve yourself, go to this

LINK HERE

To see just how much body language can reveal about a person. You will find things such as how a person lies, how the eyes reaction, the positioning of a person in personal space, mouth, and head body language and so much more.

Now first, I have to say, that the plot you’re able to come up with in one day is not going to be without its flaws, but coming up with it all at once, the entire story unfolds right in front of you and makes you want to keep going with it. So, where to begin?

What is your premise and basic plot? Pick your plot. I recommend just pulling one from this list. No plots are “original” so making yours interesting and complicated will easily distract from that fact, that and interesting characters. Characters will be something for you to work on another day, because this is plotting day. You’ll want the main plot to be fairly straight forward, because a confusing main plot will doom you if you want subplots.

Decide who the characters will be. They don’t have to have names at this point. You don’t even need to know who they are other than why they have to be in the story. The more characters there are the more complicated the plot will be. If you intend to have more than one subplot, then you’ll want more characters. Multiple interconnected subplots will give the illusion that the story is very complicated and will give the reader a lot of different things to look at at all times. It also gives you the chance to develop many side characters. The plot I worked out yesterday had 13 characters, all were necessary. Decide their “roles” don’t bother with much else. This seems shallow, but this is plot. Plot is shallow.

Now, decide what drives each character. Why specifically are they in this story? You can make this up. You don’t even know these characters yet. Just so long as everyone has their own motivations, you’re in the clear.

What aren’t these characters giving away right off the bat? Give them a secret! It doesn’t have to be something that they are actively lying about or trying to hide, just find something that perhaps ties them into the plot or subplot. This is a moment to dig into subplot. This does not need to be at all connected to their drive to be present in the story.  Decide who is in love with who, what did this person do in the 70’s that’s coming back to bite them today, and what continues to haunt what-his-face to this very day. This is where you start to see the characters take shape. Don’t worry much about who they are or what they look like, just focus on what they’re doing to the story.

What is going to change these characters? Now this will take some thinking. Everyone wants at least a few of the characters to come out changed by the end of the story, so think, how will they be different as a result of the plot/subplot? It might not be plot that changes them, but if you have a lot of characters, a few changes that are worked into the bones of the plot might help you.

Now list out the major events of the novel with subplot in chronological order. This will be your timeline. Especially list the historical things that you want to exist in backstory. List everything you can think of. Think about where the story is going. At this point, you likely haven’t focused too much on the main plot, yeah, it’s there, but now really focus on the rising actions, how this main plot builds its conflict, then the climactic moment. Make sure you get all of that in there. This might take a few hours.

Decide where to start writing. This part will take a LOT of thinking. It’s hard! But now that you’ve got the timeline, pick an interesting point to begin at. Something with action. Something relevant. Preferably not at the beginning of your timeline - you want to have huge reveals later on where these important things that happened prior are exposed. This is the point where you think about what information should come out when. This will be a revision of your last list, except instead of being chronological, it exists to build tension.

Biology

Biology

Creating a Race (2)

Creating Animals (2)

Disease (2)

Ecosystems (2)

Evolution (and Space)

Flora and Fauna

Genetics

Inventing Species

List of Legendary Creatures

Night Vision/Color Vision

People

Constructed Language (Conlang)

Basics/Phonology (2) (3)

Conlang

Conlang Guide

Conlang vs. English

Creating a Language (Revised)

Culture + Language

Curse Words

How to Create Your Own Language

How to Create a Language

IPA Pronunciation

Making Up Words

Culture Guides

7 Deadly Sins

Alien Cultures (2)

Alternative Medieval

Avoiding Cultural Appropriation

Avoiding Medieval Fantasy (2)

Avoiding One-Note Worlds

Avoiding Utopia

Change (2)

Class/Caste System (2)

Culture

Designing Intellectual Movements

Everything (2) (3)

Fantasy

Gender-Equal Societies

Historical Background for Ideas (2)

History

Matriarchy (2)

Nationalism

Nations

Slavery

Static World

Structure

Wandering Peoples

Economy

Basic Economics

Capitalism

Currency (2) (3)

Current Global Economies

Economic Systems

Economics (1500-1800 AD)

Economics and Government

Economics for Dummies

Economy

Inflation

International Trade (2)

Marxist Communism

Medieval Economics

Schools of Economic Thought

Socialism (2)

Types of Economic Systems

World Economy (2)

Everyday Life

Art

Ceremonies

Clothing

Clothing Terminology (2) (3) (4)

Clothing Reference

Demographics

Disease

Drugs

Education (2)

Fame and Infamy

Family

Food (2)

Food Timeline

Immigration/Emigration

Literature

Marriage

Months

Music

Sex

Slang

Stories

Travel

Government

Collective/Traditionalist Societies

Creating a Government

Diplomacy

Empire (2)

Fancy Latin Names for Government

History and Politics

International Relations (2)

Justice System

Lawlessness

Non-monarchical (2) (3)

Oppressive Government

Political Ideologies

Propaganda

Republic

Rise and Fall of Civilizations

Secret Societies

Shapeshifter Society

Totalitarianism, Atmosphere Necessary For

Tribal Society

Types of Government

Utopia

Writing Politics