Knowing who my story is about always helps me to come up with the story. I mean, how boring would a story be if there were no characters, right?
So I have it a little bit easy in the fact I know at least two characters already: the protagonist and the antagonist.
One thing that I like to do is figure out what the character’s profession is, are they male or female, the basic stuff. The next, and arguably the most important part of the process, is creating your character’s goals. From the workshops I’ve taken with Corey Mandell I have learned two very important things: 1) goals that create conflict are extremely important to have and 2) creating said goals are extremely difficult master.
The way to describe conflict creating goals in a way that I understand is as follows:
Your characters need to have goals in which only one character can achieve it. So if character A achieves his goal than character B will fail at theirs. Thus creating conflict.
Here is what I have come up with so far my characters so far.
One thing to note is each character, in addition to their goals have positive traits as well as negative traits…both the good and bad guys need both.
Your characters need something to overcome for their character arc. Choose only one thing they must fix. As another tip/saying I learned from SreenwritingU, “when was the last time you were able to break more than one bad habit in less than 30 days? Don’t expect your character to fix all of theirs in 90 minutes.”
The last piece of the puzzle, for me, is figuring out the stakes. A goal is only as important as the stakes associated with it. If your goal is to eat a donut, then I would have to question the importance of your goal. If the goal was to eat the last donut in the room because it contains the antidote to a spreading deadly virus, then I would understand the stakes involved with that being the goal. So makes the stakes as hard for the character as possible…and Death is not always the highest of the stakes (so I may have to revisit that).
What things do you do when creating your characters? Let us know in the comments below.