Lists of Character Traits Positive and Negative

Do you roll a die? Assign class, HPs and alignment too?

I'm-a just axing...

Willowmound is Charming, Patient, and Well-Groomed. Willowmound's mortal enemy is Belligerent, Lewd, and Profane. The story writes itself...




-Michelle

You know me so well.

I think of my characters as more than just a string of descriptives. You run into the danger of falling into the stereotyping trap if you just think of the person as a set of traits.

AND!!!! Here's a little advice which I think would help.

You have those traits, right?
Now make a story that would conflict with them.
What sort of story woul make a character be, NOT cheerful, NOT amusing, NOT gentle, when they usually are?

Having my job.

This is a much harder question, than the one I was asking, Willow.
I would say, that before any help can be rendered, you should tell us just a little more.
Time period, theme, plot, sex, for can’t build a character list for a 21st century teenager gal if your book is about a knightly quest in King Arthur’s period.

Okay, I feel like perhaps I was perhaps a bit mean/snarky in my initial response, so here goes a bit more in-depth and serious response.

I agree with Soccer Mom that it is far too easy to fall into the trap of stringing a bunch of adjectives together and thinking "Ta da--a character!". Even in real life, while I may use singular adjectives to describe somebody, behind those adjectives my brain is spinning and focusing on what I really mean, on those subtle qualities and why's and wherefor's which go beyond language's boundaries. Language is inherently limited. We try to express ourselves as best we can, but a single word is often not enough to capture the complete meaning of our intent. Exercises like this, though, I think tend to encourage trying to cage personality in a set series of vocabulary instead of focusing mental energy on understanding all the way to your bones what makes a character tick.

Assigning words to a character is just that, nothing more. Understanding a character in all their depth deep in your bones is something completely different.




-Michelle

I'd prefer not to click on the link. My characters come organically from my own mind. I don't feel the need to run through a list of character traits. Cut and paste writing seems so odd to me. I just get in the moment and watch to see what comes out of it. Suggestions from outside the box of my mind are just weird while I'm hooked into the process.

Willowmound said:

Do you roll a die? Assign class, HPs and alignment too?

Click to expand...

Isn't that the normal way one creates characters?

I like to draw notes from a hat.

While I wasn't a fan of this particular link, for this last story I have used a set of questions that I snagged off the inter-webbie a while ago. The first portion is about physical traits, to help me keep track of all those pesky little details, and then there is a section on family and childhood, your character's character (alright, that's a little cheesy I suppose, lol), likes and style, where and how your character lives now, life before the story, and then some cobbled together bizarre questions from various places.
I have found it very useful. Each section has 5-10 questions, and I find that rather than limiting my characters in any 2-D or stereotypical way, it has really helped me to polish my characters much more quickly than previously. Before I would have a plot half way finished and outlined, and the characters fuzzily formed, and then I would write. Somewhere during chapter 4 I would suddenly be struck with a problem about the characters history that I hadn't fully developed, and have to go back and change it... which meant editing rather than writing until it was fixed.
I also feel my characters are a little more complete, for lack of a better word. Maybe I am maturing as a writer, but I feel that it would take me some time, previously, to fully understand or flesh out some of the deeper dimensions of my characters. This time I feel like I have found all that before I have even begun the WIP, specifically because of this trait sheet. It has made me follow the natural progression and root causes of a lot of their personality traits. It's hard to verbalize (or the writing equivalent), but I guess all those aspects and traits I wish I had understood motivated my characters and the shaping of the story, I understand before chapter 7 and it comes as a surprise, and at the expense of depth for those first chapters.
Who knows....I might get to chapter 7 and think, "Gee! I didn't really know anything at all. MC1 just shot MC2 and I NEVER would have guessed that on her character sheet." lol.