I was going to ask a question about which scene would be more beneficial to the current chapter I'm working on but I answered my own question as I typed. Thank you writer's forum- you helped me without even trying! whee
On a completely different note I was wondering what the strongest character you've created is and why you think they are /good/ effective/ well developed characters?
I just thought I'd ask because sometimes people find that when this question is concerning a novel it's too intrusive. I was telling my roomate about my plot and he pulled a line from my 8th grade English teacher- "So what?" (in a non-insulting way of course- you've all heard this method used before right? Ask a writer so what and force them to fillgaps and what not.) So I decided to use it for characters instead.
I'm currently in the process of planning for a novel I'm thinking of writing, and it has a character named Caela with dark brown eyes, dark blonde hair, petite figure, and beautiful face. I connect with her so well, because we're both deaf and reserved, and I incorporate my emotions into her character, giving her story deep, sincere feelings. I plan for the end of the novel to be her overcoming of shyness and troubles with self-acceptance.
Good on ya for writing! >w> I never seem to get anywhere with writing myself~
As for what I consider to be MY strongest character, I'd have to say it's a character I have called Momo. He's a complete grump but, in the story I'm incorporating him in (that I'm gonna try to make a comic out of as soon as my exams finish), it's not that he is strong, but it's the characters he'll interact with that make him more developed than just being a brat. They make him realize things about himself and face his personal issues, and while he's reluctant and disgruntled at first, he begins to show empathy subtly more and more.
And yea... So that's kinda my technique, the main characters usually lack something (an emotion, general personality, too naive, whatever it may be) and it's the other characters in the story that make them strong characters. It's a little cliche but it seems to work for myself sweatdrop
I feel that Clyde is my strongest character.
I know this because of how he feels next to my less developed characters. I can imagine what he would do in all situations.
He has faults that I have to work with or work around or with that are always there. It's the reoccurring traits that makes him feel developed to me.
He changes and struggles, but he's still there. I can feel when they're out of character.
It could also be argued that that's just my best developed project.
In my newer projects are my less developed characters. They're flip floppy, not steady, the plot overpowers them, if that makes any sense.
He starts off caring for few, doesn't care about anyone else, and generally unforgiving with conditional love. When his family is threatened, he kind of realizes that it doesn't matter if someone he loved wronged him, because if you don't stand for your own family, the people irrevocably bound to you, you're alone. He learns to forgive and his family love unconditionally, even if they hurt him, which he'd never admit to anyway.
He finds out certain things about the past, for the first time feeling bad about the cruelties people inflict on others and decides that his indifference towards the pain of other people isn't helping. He never turns into the "I love everybody!" type but if you look like you can't help yourself, he'll lend you a hand.
My strongest character of all is Ember, a paladin from a fantasy piece I've got on the back-burner for a time, because I'm co-writing it with someone else (he's got the villains and I've got the heroes).
It's an epic fantasy type story, and Ember is the mentor for the younger paladin whose going to rise up to fight the major villain in the end. Pretty much the minute I envisioned her I knew her whole story completely. She's obsessed with the conditions of her death so that her family will be redeemed as her father was a deserter from the army and her mother wasted away in shame and grief. She's barren and can't have any children to carry on their name (this is a society where names pass along the female side, as the men are almost all drafted into the army unless they are incapable of fighting and often don't survive long. Women are actually encouraged to remarry if their first husbands die in such a way so as to sustain the family name.) so she feels as if she must die honorably and gloriously in battle--which would grant her family the highest honor available in their society. To defeat the major villain, she would have to care about survival. So instead of defeating him herself, she trains the MC to survive instead. Over the course of the story, the MC is to teach her to value her life in the present while she is training him.
The protagonist, Helena, of the fantasy serial I'm working on is quickly becoming the strongest, most well developed character I've ever written. Which is a little interesting to me, since she was originally just going to be someone who died to get another character invested in taking down the antagonist. With every chapter I wrote, it became clearer that she was a better protagonist than who I had originally planned.
Still need to write moar and actually get mad skills and work on execution and all, but in my head, my strongest---my most developed or fleshed-out character---is Tertek Nasaif. It seems like I have the best grasp of his motivations, prejudices, fears, emotions, personality, et cetera, out of any of my characters. He's also one who's been around in some incarnation for a long time. I'm still no good at character genesis and how to make interesting, distinct ones, but I never seem to have any troubles writing Ter.
Dunno what else qualifies him as a strong character, since he's a racist, superstitious, bitter, selfish, angry thing made of skin and bones and disappointment. Also criminally inclined.
My adviser loved to ask "so what?" - that was his general label for the last section of papers. ^.^;'
Strongest character I've come up with yet just came to be because as I was writing I became more clear on who he was as I became more and more uncertain of who the main guy was. xd A bit of an inverse correlation there. Sadly I think this means I have to rework the main guy. He's too understated and grumpy.
I have two strong characters tied in first place. One is an androgynous demon who goes through so much crap but comes out of it shakingly but stronger every time. I've written that into his character, and with each story he is changed stronger than the last. The second is a demon who is transgender (was in life, still is in demon) who deals with her personal demons from life, yet applies them to her demon death and walks forward no matter what. There is so much pain in their stories, pain I applied from my life, and they survive their lives like I survive mine.
Still need to write moar and actually get mad skills and work on execution and all, but in my head, my strongest---my most developed or fleshed-out character---is Tertek Nasaif. It seems like I have the best grasp of his motivations, prejudices, fears, emotions, personality, et cetera, out of any of my characters. He's also one who's been around in some incarnation for a long time. I'm still no good at character genesis and how to make interesting, distinct ones, but I never seem to have any troubles writing Ter.
Dunno what else qualifies him as a strong character, since he's a racist, superstitious, bitter, selfish, angry thing made of skin and bones and disappointment. Also criminally inclined.
i'm intrigued by the idea. in fact... the "why isn't he more than 'criminally inclined'?" may also be why he's a strong character. xD with all of those shining personality traits, i'm surprised that he doesn't walk the streets with a semi-automatic and a rosary.
what i love about my characters is that i give them opportunities to make good decisions- and they frequently make not-so-good ones. better than that: i know why they choose to do what they do (and they're not OOC mistakes made just to drive the story).
they also have the capacity to change over time, with story developments and as they understand more about why events have happened around them as they have. there is also room for growth when things happen to them that they can't control- things that aren't necessarily the consequences of their own actions solely inflicted upon them. neither is perfect, of course, and neither becomes perfect. (if nick dares to try, i will kill him off. i swear it.)
tara, on the other hand, irritates me. i think that i'm having trouble writing female characters because i know too much about women to start generalizing them. or the opposite- i know so much about them that, for my sanity's sake, i compensate by creating grotesque mary sues. xD i would like for her to be more than a half-unwitting, magical girl-creature bent on saving the universe, but none of her other personality traits has come off strongly enough to warrant any merit at all. her greatest obstacle is herself, and i think that i'm doing a terrible job of facilitating even that, at the moment. i do mention that she has a history of depression- something that impacts one of her strongest relationships. she studies physics, but i think that she's doing it half-heartedly; i really have no idea why she chose physics (and i hate physics. i hate researching it and writing it. garrr). she will question something to pieces if it gets her attention- if she doesn't care about it, she tends to leave it on a backburner indefinitely. she is definitely tenacious, stubborn, and borderline obsessive-compulsive. ...maybe her dad and his disappearance are figuring into the physics bit.
anyway. part of her is a manipulating, rule-bending creature for whom "the ends justify the means". the other part of her cares about people and their happiness and her relationships with them. sometimes the two interests coincide... but as the story progresses, they begin to clash, especially as the touchy-feely part realizes what's been unwittingly sacrificed to achieve what she thought would be others' happiness.
i dunno. i'm not sold. the two "parts", as i describe them, are really more complicated than that. for the first, there are severe restrictions on what she can say and do- and her existence is that of service to others- so of course she's goal-oriented and forced to prioritize how to use her resources. the second part is by necessity ignorant of the first and therefore sheltered (except for the suicidal best friend, the mysterious disappearance of her dad, and her mom's alienation and tara's subsequent depression).
blahblahblah. maybe i'm doing her a disservice by not having written up a six-page biography like i have my other mains. pfft.
I'm really trying to avoid saying "my current project" because that's all I talk about on this and soon you're all going to realise that actually I don't write that much and my current project is the only decent thing I've done but...
I would have to say Murray, the main male protagonist of my current project. Whilst the characters around him have a tendency to have a "angst about my problems" mentality, as they all are trying to fix a problem in their past in the most violent way possible, Murray is trying to make the best out of a bad situation. He is calm most times, doesn't complain about moments in his past and tries to protect those around him.
It's somewhat sad that he gets slightly overlooked with the drama of everybody else.
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