Thread: A question of character development

Mr Master said Are we talking about creating characters or how we take characters from one place to another? Because I think that's inextricably intertwined. When you create a character for a story, you really ought to know what kind of story you're going to be writing up front. Oh, sure, you can be surprised along the way, particularly if you're doing it RP-style with a partner like on this board, but basically, you've got to have some kind of direction to go in. This is one reason I tend to dislike omni-powerful characters, ones who are so badass up front. Mostly, that kind of thing is someone who doesn't feel very confident in real life, and wants to play someone who is. Which is just fine, and psychologically necessary at points, but at my stage in writing and reading, it's not interesting. To me, the only reason you'd make a character a superlative master of a given skill is if you want that skill to be mostly irrelevant to the plot. Oh, sure, if you're a supreme fighter, you have to have one or two fight scenes, just to show off, but most of your story is going to be about non-fighting things. The way to make it interesting again is if the character suddenly loses the ability, or finds something he or she can't handle, and then has to get clever to figure out how to get past that obstacle. It's like... you're reading a comic book, and Wolverine gets into a fight. You have no reason to expect anything but his win, so unless there's some creative violence, unusual imagery in the fight scene, you can safely skip to the end when the real plot comes up again. Wolverine fighting isn't the point. Wolverine doing something unusual during the fight, like finding a clue or explaining a plot point, or gasp LOSING, that's interesting. Okay, end of tangent. Good characters change. Whether good or evil, they alter as they experience the story, learn things, interact with others. The self-discovery method is good and true-to-life, because hardly any of us are really what we tell ourselves we are, and why would characters be any different, except that they tend to find out the truth through the story, and the rest of us rarely do. A character designed to change like in a poem or song lyric is perfectly valid I once played an RP based on a Browning poem, so I get that. Ultimately, your inspiration for the character is immaterial. Inspiration comes from literally anywhere. Hell, a melting icicle can spark a thought that leads to a character. The important thing is the character goes from point A to poing B, and is different in some manner along the way. Look at WALL-E, for example. He doesn't change much, really, as a personality. A little bit, as he dies and comes back, and then finds fulfillment. But really, everyone around him changes, as a direct result of interacting with him. And it's organic and believable, but wouldn't have happened without that interaction. Besides being a good example of visual storytelling, that movie shows a lot of good things we can use. Click to expand... I know this topic is a bit old by now, but you bring up a very valid point. Besides, take a look at Chrono from Chrono Crusade. He goes through a bit of a Heroic BSOD link for the explanation here in the manga when he doesn't want to draw upon his Legion - because in turn, it would ultimately kill Rosette due to a contract they forged years ago if he drew upon it too much - but that's all I plan on revealing at the moment. You'd have to read it for yourself in order to get the full gist of it. I suppose what I'm trying to get at here is what does someone use to draw upon the inspiration to either create a character or develop it further to make it more believable. Do you draw upon events that happened to you in the past, from watching something on TV that you wanted to try for yourself or is there something else more that inspires you to do it? Whatever the case may be, I think that your post virtually explains the whole theory in a nutshell, MM. 1 Internets for you.