A Box Full of Questions!

Write one to ten pages (I usually do 5 for major character, 1 or 2 for side characters) as your character. Anything they would say, opinions, diary entries, complaining, etc.

Ooooh I have collected some helpful things to maybe include:

adopting slang from people they are close too/love interest

do they have a raspy voice? High pitched? Overly sweet? Commanding? Figure that out.

to make characters have their own voice vary rhythm, word choice, use of profanity, how much they talk about themselves or others, their politics.

Take some dialogue and ask if readers would be able to tell who is speaking with no context.

Write an AITA post from their point of view.

Identify what role your character has, a leader? a follower? a disrupter? a rebel? an antagonist? a peacemaker? How does that change the way they speak?

Giving personality to a character is an essential part of character development in storytelling, whether you're writing a novel, screenplay, or creating a character for a role-playing game. Here are some steps and considerations to help you give personality to your character:

Understand Their Backstory:

Start by creating a detailed backstory for your character. Where were they born? What were their childhood experiences like? What significant events have shaped their life? Understanding their past can help you determine their motivations, fears, and desires.

2. Define Their Goals and Motivations:

Characters often become more interesting when they have clear goals and motivations. What does your character want? It could be something tangible like a job or a romantic relationship, or it could be an abstract desire like happiness or freedom.

3. Determine Their Strengths and Weaknesses:

No one is perfect, and characters should reflect this. Identify your character's strengths and weaknesses. This can include physical abilities, intellectual skills, and personality traits. Flaws can make characters relatable and three-dimensional.

4. Consider Their Personality Traits:

Think about your character's personality traits. Are they introverted or extroverted? Shy or outgoing? Kind or selfish? Create a list of traits that describe their character. You can use personality frameworks like the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator or the Big Five Personality Traits as a starting point.

5. Give Them Quirks and Habits:

Quirks and habits can make a character memorable. Do they have a specific way of speaking, a unique fashion style, or an unusual hobby? These details can help bring your character to life.

6. Explore Their Relationships:

Characters don't exist in isolation. Consider how your character interacts with others. What are their relationships like with family, friends, and enemies? These relationships can reveal a lot about their personality.

7. Show, Don't Tell:

Instead of explicitly telling the audience about your character's personality, show it through their actions, dialogue, and decisions. Let the reader or viewer infer their traits based on their behavior.

8. Create Internal Conflict:

Characters with internal conflicts are often more engaging. What inner struggles does your character face? These can be related to their goals, values, or past experiences.

9. Use Character Arcs:

Consider how your character will change or grow throughout the story. Character development is often about how a character evolves in response to the events and challenges they face.

10. Seek Inspiration:

Draw inspiration from real people, other fictional characters, or even historical figures. Study how people with similar traits and backgrounds behave to inform your character's actions and reactions.

11. Write Dialogue and Inner Monologues:

Writing dialogue and inner monologues from your character's perspective can help you get inside their head and understand their thought processes and emotions.

12. Consider the Setting:

The setting of your story can influence your character's personality. For example, a character who grows up in a war-torn environment may have a different personality than one raised in a peaceful, affluent society.

13. Revise and Refine:

Don't be afraid to revise and refine your character as you write and develop your story. Characters can evolve and change as the narrative unfolds.

- hijabis get really excited over pretty scarves - they also like to collect pins and brooches - we get asked a lot of questions and it can be annoying or it can be amusing, just depends on our mood and personality and how the question is phrased - common questions include: - “not even water?” (referring to fasting) - hijabis hear a lot of “do you sleep in that?” (we don’t) and “where is your hair?” (in a bun or a braid, usually) - “is it mooze-slim or mozzlem?” (the answer is neither, it’s muslim, with a soft s and accent on the first syllable) - “ee-slam or iz-lamb?” (it’s iss-laam, accent on the first syllable) - “hee-job?” (heh-jahb, accent on the second syllable)

- “kor-an?” (no. quran. say it like koor-annn, accent on the second syllable) - people tend to mess up our names really badly and you just get a sigh and a resigned nod or an awkward smile, maybe a nickname instead - long hair is easy to hide, short hair is harder to wrap up - hijab isn’t just covering hair, it’s also showing as little skin as possible with the exception of face, hands, and feet, and not wearing tight/sheer clothing - that applies to men too, people just don’t like to mention it ( i wonder why) - henna/mehendi isn’t just for special occasions, you’ll see people wearing it for fun - henna/mehendi isn’t just for muslims, either, it’s not a religious thing - henna/mehendi is not just for women, men also wear it, especially on their weddings - there are big mehendi parties in the couple of nights before eid where people (usually just women and kids) gather and do each other’s mehendi, usually just hands and feet - five daily prayers - most muslim kids can stutter through a couple verses of quran in the original arabic text by the age of seven or eight, it does not matter where they live or where they’re from or what language they speak natively - muslim families tend to have multiple copies of the quran - there are no “versions” of the quran, there has only ever been one. all muslims follow the exact same book - muslims have no concept of taking God’s name in vain, we call on God at every little inconvenience - don’t use islamic phrases if you don’t know what they mean or how to use them. we use them often, inside and outside of religious settings. in islam, it is encouraged to mention God often and we say these things very casually, but we take them very seriously - Allahu Akbar means “God is Greatest” (often said when something shocks or surprises us, or if we’re scared or daunted, or when something amazing happens, whether it be good or bad; it’s like saying “oh my god”) - Subhan Allah means “Glory be to God” (i say subhan Allah at the sky, at babies, at trees, whatever strikes me as pleasant, especially if it’s in nature) - Bismillah means “in the name of God” and it’s just something you say before you start something like eating or doing your homework - In Shaa Allah means “if God wills” (example: you’ll be famous, in shaa Allah) (it’s a reminder that the future is in God’s hands, so be humble and be hopeful)

This post is part of a double feature for the same ask. First check out Mod Colette's answer to OP's original question at: A Careful Balance: Portraying a Black Character's Relationship with their Hair. Below are notes on character naming from Mod Rina.

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@writingraccoon said:

My character is black in a dungeons and dragons-like fantasy world. His name is Kazuki Haile (pronounced hay-lee), and his mother is this world's equivalent of Japanese, which is where his first name is from, while his father is this world's equivalent of Ethiopian, which is where his last name is from. He looks much more like his father, and has hair type 4a. [...]

Hold on a sec.

Haile (pronounced hay-lee), [...] [H]is father is this world’s equivalent of Ethiopian, which is where his last name is from. 

OP, where did you get this name? Behindthename.com, perhaps?

Note how it says, “Submitted names are contributed by users of this website. Check marks indicate the level to which a name has been verified.” Do you see any check marks, OP? 

What language is this, by the way? If we only count official languages, Ethiopia has 5: Afar, Amharic, Oromo, Somali, & Tigrinya. If we count everything native to that region? Over 90 languages. And I haven't even mentioned the dormant/extinct ones. Do you know which language this name comes from? Have you determined Kazuki’s father’s ethnic group, religion, and language(s)? Do you know just how ethnically diverse Ethiopia is? 

~ ~ ~

To All Looking for Character Names on the Internet:

Skip the name aggregators and baby name lists. They often do not cite their sources, even if they’re pulling from credible ones, and often copy each other. 

If you still wish to use a name website, find a second source that isn’t a name website. 

Find at least one real life individual, living or dead, who has this given name or surname. Try Wikipedia’s lists of notable individuals under "List of [ethnicity] people." You can even try searching Facebook! Pay attention to when these people were born for chronological accuracy/believability. 

Make sure you know the language the name comes from, and the ethnicity/culture/religion it’s associated with. 

Make sure you understand the naming practices of that culture—how many names, where they come from, name order, and other conventions. 

Make sure you have the correct pronunciation of the name. Don’t always trust Wikipedia or American pronunciation guides on Youtube. Try to find a native speaker or language lesson source, or review the phonology & orthography and parse out the string one phoneme at a time. 

Suggestions for web sources:

Wikipedia! Look for: “List of [language] [masculine/feminine] given names,” “List of most common [language] family names,” “List of most common surnames in [continent],” and "List of [ethnicity] people."  

Census data! Harder to find due to language barriers & what governments make public, but these can really nail period accuracy. This may sound obvious, but look at the year of the character's birth, not the year your story takes place. 

Forums and Reddit. No really. Multicultural couples and expats will often ask around for what to name their children. There’s also r/namenerds, where so many folks have shared names in their language that they now have “International Name Threads.” These are all great first-hand sources for name connotations—what’s trendy vs. old-fashioned, preppy vs. nerdy, or classic vs. overused vs. obscure. 

~ ~ ~

Luckily for OP, I got very curious and did some research. More on Ethiopian & Eritrean naming, plus mixed/intercultural naming and my recommendations for this character, under the cut. It's really interesting, I promise!

for those of you who don't know, i have a masterlist of CSP tutorials and guides available to read for free! all of the guides are made by me in the past couple years. most are twitter thread links, but eventually i plan to convert them all to tumblr posts when if find the time.

Stop creating characters without understanding their values.

As writers, it is essential to define what our characters care about. But could there be an objective and universal model of human values?

No, probably not. But, we can ask some interrogating questions.

When you strip away all construct, culture, setting, programming, and experience, what defines our motivations? How do our motivations relate to each other? All models are false, but there are various frameworks we can pull from to arrive at something useful for writing fiction.

Okay But Who Are You?

I'm a writer and I study narrative psychology. I have worked in professional marketing and branding for a decade, and have built this values model over the past 5 years, based on contemporary sociological research.

You can check out the academic sources at the bottom of the post.

Here's a peek at the model

The core of the model has Altruism-Egoism as the vertical axis, and Collectivism-Individualism as the horizontal access.

If you're a D&D player, think of this like an upgraded alignment chart.

Where these two axes intersect is the meat of the whole model. The Mastery axis and the Service axis. This emergent relationship forecasts much of the rest of the model.

The second ring shows the 8 Interpersonal Ideologies. Each one aligns to an intersection of the 8 spokes of the center wheel.

Each Ideology is divided into 3 values. For example, let's look at Autonomy. The three values are Curiosity, Creativity, Independence.

An archetype straddles two values. For example, the Inventor is Curiosity-Creativity. The Artist is Creativity-Independence.

Finally, the 8 Desires ring the outside. Each one aligns directly to a spoke on the center wheel.

With the full model, you can not only understand your character's values better, but also contextualize them against the values of the world they live in.

Here is where I ask you for help.

I have 50+ awesome resources for free at free.loreteller.com.

I am trying to share my knowledge and pay rent at the same time, so I have 10 resources offered as a premium download on my Gumroad site.

Here's the situation: Gumroad won't publish my content on their Discover page until I hit $10 of sales.

Here's what I'm offering: I'm giving a Tumblr-specific discount code for the full Character Values Model.

tumblrcheatcode

The full price is $9, but with the discount code, you'll get it for $1. If just 10 people buy it, I can publish my content on Gumroad's Discover page.

Grab it here:

If you can't afford it, a reblog still helps! If you're not interested, no worries! I'll keep sharing writing tools and advice. Thanks for reading!

Sources

Theory of Basic Human Values - Schwartz PhD  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_Basic_Human_Values

Cultural Map - Inglehart PhD, Welzel PhD  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inglehart-Welzel_cultural_map_of_the_world

Pearson-Marr Archetype Indicator - Pearson PhD  https://www.uiltexas.org/files/capitalconference/Twelve_Character_Archetypes.pdf

16 Basic Desires Theory - Steven Reiss  https://www.google.com/books/edition/Who_am_I/EbOjA5oAsEUC?hl=en

Moral Foundations Theory - Jonathan Haidt  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_foundations_theory

Looking to learn to draw something new? Touch up on your art skills with some practice exercises? Get started in your art journey?

I’ve put together a google doc linking to a bunch of art resources and tutorials for all those art learning needs! >:3

You could have your absolute masterpiece plotted out in your mind. But it doesn't mean shit if your brain just casually says one day, "hey, what if I replaced that with something else? that isn't a question btw, i'm doing that against your will :)"

Remember kids!

KEEP EVERYTHING YOU NEED WRITTEN DOWN ANYWHERE!

[ID: A reply from user, goldpilot22, "imo a good way to do this is just, ramble the hell out it in a discord server (preferably one that you own) whether or not there's other people in said server. the casual format that talking about things in discord often takes can make it easier to get the information written out" /End ID]

YES! I also recommend this. I use to do something like that in a server, though it was one I am no longer apart of.

While having other people in the server is purely optional, having people that aren't directly involved with your story can help bring input from a viewer standpoint. Plus there's the advantage of being able to censor your messages. So people wouldn't have to worry about getting spoiled major plot points.

I also suggest having a seperate thread of each of your characters. Main and side characters. Rather it be for having a lil bio for them or to just spam memes/media that would relate to them. Hell I even have a server for that (since it started as an emote and image storage server for a character I RPed as but didn't wanna flood the campaign server with).