How to Create Good Characters

This is not a post about character as in a person's character. It's about charaters, as in books and movies. Keep reading if you want to find out how I create characters.

First off, create a sort of form/character sheet. I gernerally use this one.

Full name:
Nickname:
Gender:
Age:
Personality:
Crush:
GF/BF:
Likes:
Dislikes:
Strengths:
Weaknesses:
Talents:
Description:
Other:
History:

Now, that seems like a bunch of random things. Here's the same form, but with a breif explanation of each word.

Full name: The full name of your character. Such as Lucy Rae McFly
Nickname: Any nicknames your character might have. Include deragatory/harmful nicknames.
Gender: This is pretty obvious, right?
Age: Pretty obvious?
Personality: Use a series of words to describe your character. Such as 'helpful, mistrusting, angrey, loving, silly, bubbly, fun, annoying' and any other adjectives you might come up with.
Crush: Who your character has a crush on.
GF/BF: Your character's boyfriend or girlfriend, if they have one.
Likes: A list of likes. Could be anything from apples to swimming to hand grenades. Both things your character likes to do, eat, see, and what types of people they like.
Dislikes: The opposite of above.
Strengths: This is different from likes. While your character may like some things, they may not be good at them, or the thing may not be able to be a strength. (like apples... how could that be a strength??)
Weaknesses: Opposite of above. Also things your characer doesn't like doing (such as telling lies)
Talents: Choose a few strengths (or even weaknesses, since telling convincing lies is a talent, albeit one we don't really want) and list them here. This is what your character is really good at.
Description: Describe how your character looks. Don't just find a picture and say 'that's it', take time to describe how your character looks. Let's face it, this is great practice for describing things when you're writing as well.
Other: Anything else not covered by the other topics you wnat to include.
History: This is where you write a bit about your character's past. Try to have a decent sized paragraph on this. You don't have to go in depth, just try to have their life outlined in simple sentances.

Now I shall show you a character I've created with this form. In the story this character is in, he is stranded on an island with the rest of his school class.

Full name: Markus James McKethe
Nickname: Mark
Gender: M
Age: 18
Personality: Kind, honest, loyal, stubbon, a little loud, funny, has ocasional bouts of moodiness, can be serious when needed to be.
Crush: It will most likely end up Rebecca
GF/BF: None
Likes: Jokes, honey, coffee, climbing, soccer and football, frisbees.
Dislikes: Losing, not having coffee, people who can't take a joke.
Strengths: Climbing, finding honey and coffee plants, identifying plants, general althleticism, endurance.
Weaknesses: Sprinting for much more than 25-ish yards, making things that stand up to a stiff breeze, math, art of any kind (he's horrible at it).
Talents: Finding and identifying plants, finding honey, climbing, endurance.
Description: Markus is slightly above average height, at 6 feet tall. He is pretty muscular since he has been working out for four years. He has reddish brown hair and green eyes. He has huge feet that he constantly trips over.
Other: He is very clumsy, klutzy would be a beter discription.
History: Markus was born to a 17 year-old girl who made a huge mistake. She knew she wasn't ready for taking care of an infant, so she put him up for adoption. Almost right away he was adopted. Markus grew up in a loving family. He has seven siblings, two sisters who were born naturaly to his parents after they adopted him, one brother who was also 'natural' child, an adopted brother/sister set of twins, and two more adopted brothers, both older than him. He learned how to make himself heard by having that lot for a family. His older brothers are both married. The oldest has two kids already and the younger of them has one child. Markus had a best friend named Rob when he was 13. One day Rob dissapeared and was never found. Markus has always felt guilty about that. He feels as if he could have stopped it.

And there you have it! That is my way of creating a character. Of course, any character that's created has a great chance of growing into something you weren't planning one, so don't worry if that happens and ride the tides of your imagination!

ba-dee ba-dee ba-dee, That's all folks!

Saturday Stories!!.... On Wednesday.

So I don't remember exactly where I left off.  So I backtracked a little bit to a place I new I'd covered.

Jake turned back to the surrounding flora.  “I think there’s...” His voice trailed off and he surged forward through the underbrush.

“Jake?  Jake!  Where are you going?”  I tripped over branches that lashed out at me in his wake.  I scrambled to my feet and followed him again.

“Come on Sara!  I KNOW this place!  I KNOW it!” Jake called out excitedly to me.  I grunted in reply as I struggled to keep up with him.  Jake turned a corner and I lost sight of him.

“Jake?  Jake?”

A hand shot out from under me and pulled me into the earth.  Another hand wrapped it’s bony self around my mouth before I could make any sound that might give me away.  I twisted around till I could see the face of my captor.  As soon as I had, I wished I hadn’t, for it was one of the dreaded Arouthgrots.  Two evil red eyes stared at me from their abyss of a face.  I knew that I was as good as dead now.  Once an Arouthgrot has captured its prey, in this case, me, it won’t let go for anything.  Fortunately, the Arouthgrots also knock their prey out quickly, so that’s what happened to me next.  It seemed hours that I wallowed in the murky darkness of unconsciousness, waiting for death.  The next waking thing I knew, I was staring into Jake’s face.

“Where am I?” I asked him.

“Sara!  You’re alive!”  Jake said, mountains of relief in his voice and what looked like tears in his eyes.  Wait.  Tears?  JAKE?

“Why wouldn’t I be alive?” I asked, then remembered what had happened before falling unconscious. “Wait, stupid question.  A better one would be *how* am I alive?”

Jake was silent for a minute before starting his side of the tale.

“After a minute, I realized you weren’t following me anymore.  In fact, I couldn’t hear any noise from you.  So I followed my trail until I found where yours ended.  It was so strange.  Half of one of your footprints was gone.  I felt around that spot until I found a trapdoor.  It covered half of one of your prints.  Before I entered, I looked around for some sort of weapon.  I found you knife.” 

Here Jake paused and handed my knife back to me.  I took it by the emerald green hilt and turned it over as he continued.

 “I also grabbed a dry branch and made a torch out of it and the bottom of my shirt.  I lit it using your knife and a stone.  Then I was ready to find you.  I pried up the trapdoor and dropped myself in.  The door closed with an ominous thud behind me.” 

I could see Jake was beginning to enter story telling mode.  Now I suspected that he would go into more detail and such. 

“I shuddered at the sudden chill that blew towards me, fouled with smells from the deep pit of the world.  But I could not stay there.  I had a princess to find.  The tunnel led me onwards and with your knife and the torch, I wasn’t afraid of much, though I was certainly wary of any noise.  Then, my torch blew out.  And of course, I hadn’t thought to bring a rock with me to use to light it again.”

He play bowed.

“Jake the Unorganized, at your service.” 

I laughed of course.  It was so typical of him. 

“Anyways, without my light, panic threatened to take control.  I must have stood there for five minutes trying to regain my control of myself.  After I found that I could breath, I continued my way up the tunnel, feeling the sides since my light was gone.  That’s when I ran smack dab into some sort of furry critter.  It squealed and raced back the direction it had come from.  I figured that if such a critter was running that way, there must be a way out in that direction.  So I sprinted after.  Needless to say, it was much faster than me and I soon lost it.  Then I realized that I was lost as well.  Whatever it was had careened through the tunnels and preformed so many switchbacks and darted off into so many tunnels that I had absolutely no clue where I was or even what direction I had come from.  The music reached me then;  wild, haunting music.  It seemed to reach into the very depths of my soul and grasp at my feelings.  It pulled me to a large room where it abruptly stopped.  Then I realized my mistake.    It was an enchantment.  It had pulled me into the center of the Arouthgrot tunnel network.  I ducked into the shadows before they could see me.  I felt a hand on my shoulder and whirled around, your knife in hand, to see who it was.  No one was there.  A voice that I instantly knew I could trust whispered in my ear, 'All will be well, This, I can tell, that you will be alright.  Follow the glow, You must need go slow, Never stray from the light.'  Of course, after this cryptic message, my nerves were all on end.  Then the strangest thing happened.  Your knife hilt began to glow.  A pure, white glow.  It flowed out from the blade tip and onto the floor, following what seemed to be a set course.  I thought that if the Arouthgrots hadn't seen me before, they would now.  Amazingly, they paid no attention to me in the least.  I figured that I might as well follow the voice's directions, so I stepped into the path of light.  Instantly, the glow shot upward to cover me.  I figured that this must be some sort of invisibility device.  I was right.  I followed the path until I came to a mirror.  It have no clue what a mirror was doing underground.  But the glow seemed to enter the mirror and continue on down a path inside.  Logic told me that it was just a reflection, but my heart urged me to step inside anyways.  I did.  The mirror absorbed me like a dry rag absorbs washwater.  It was the second most strange feeling I've felt in my life, being sucked in like that.  The *first* most strange feeling was what went on inside the mirror.  Scenes of my life began to play before my eyes in perfect detail, from the exact perspective I had viewed them when I lived them.  They started from me entering the mirror and rapidly progressed backwards through my life.  Arguments I had tried to forget, mistakes that cost me a lot, times of laughter I never want to forget all moved past me at blinding speed.  Then I saw my first year.  Sara, I've NEVER known where I came from... not till that moment.  Sara, you were right.  I am the high king of Lathlialta.  Every detail of my first year is so vivid!  I remember the Rantorgans destroying my father's palace.  I remember watching from my cradle as they killed my mother, who as desperately trying to protect me, in front of."

All the tears I had seen in Jake's eyes were now falling out at these awful memories.

Hello Neglected Blog

Sorry dear blog, I've been busy, lol.

Well, I've decided that Saturdays will be "Saturday Stories".  Here is the continuation of the story I posted a bit of... two weeks ago.

Jake was a sight to behold.  His mouth hung slack, his eyes grew huge and his legs appeared as if they could give way at any moment.  He opened and closed his mouth as if trying to speak.  No sound was emitted.  He licked his lips and tried again.

“Sara!  You never told me your friend was a dragon!”

I grinned at him as I scrambled aboard Klypton’s scaly back.

“You coming?”

“Of course!  I mean, if Klypton doesn’t mind of course.”

I felt a tickle in my thoughts and repeated the dragon’s message to Jake.

“He says he would gladly carry you if you are indeed the one who has helped his dear friend Sara in her quest.”

Jake carefully climbed up behind me.  “What exactly was your quest?  I know you were collecting a special something, but you never told me what it was.  All I ever saw of it was round hard stones.”

“Jake.  Those so called stones WERE my quest!  They were dragon eggs!  They are rock hard at first and come in beautiful colours.  Thus, they were mistakenly part of rare stone collections.  My job was to get them back to their, and my, place of origin; Charissta.”  I told Klypton we were ready and he took off, beating the air with his wings until we looked no bigger than a sparrow from the ground.  I could almost feel Jake’s confusion as he sat behind me.

“are you saying that you’re from Charissta, your made-up country?  The one you even know the constitution for?  You’re crazy!”

“I may be crazy, but at least I’m sane.” I then told him with a smile.  Of course, he couldn’t see the smile because he was behind me.

“You are so weird.”

I laughed.  “Thank you."

"Now would you be so kind as to explain all this?"

"Certainly.  I'm not actually a distant cousin of your mother's father's cousin's sister's great nephew's cousin, thank goodness.  That was just an easy way to get people confused and to get them to quit asking me who I was."

"You're telling me!" Jake cut in, "That took me five minutes to try to get it straight the first time I heard you say it, and then I just gave up cause it was too confusing!"

"Right, now on with my tale.  Back in Charissta, I was given the task of finding and obtaining seventeen dragon eggs that were stolen from my world.  Thanks to your wonderful help, I've now completed the quest and am going to send the eggs back to their rightful home.  Now I'm going to drop a bombshell on you, Jake.  You are not from Earth either.  You were swiped off Charissta when you were but eleven months old and transplanted into the adoption systems here on Earth."

"What on earth are you talking about?  I'm adopted, but that doesn't mean you can go around making up stories about my origin!"

"It's not stories Jake!  I'm telling the truth!  Now hang on, this is gonna get a little wild."  I asked Klypton to surge up as high and as fast as he could, then, when we were as high as we could go without passing out from lack of air, we dove nearly straight down.  The wind whistled by our ears as we hung on for dear life.  Just as Klypton would have hit the ground, we entered a special portalway that wouldn't open unless you were riding a diving dragon.  Blue sparks seemed to eat away at us while the air clung to our skin as if charged with static electricity mixed with half-set pudding.  All feeling faded away then came rushing back.  We were through.  Klypton settled down in a clearing filled with green grass.  Jake slid off and walked towards a stump in the middle of the clearing.  I followed him, not sure what he was doing.

"I remember this." he said softly.  "I was surrounded by talking animals and pushed through a portalway."  He turned around to me, clearly exited now.  "Sara!  I remember!  I WAS from Charissta!  I was!  This is so cool!"  He turned around and stared at the surrounding land.  I knelt down and bowed my head.

"What do you say we do now, Prince?"

Jake was startled and faced me again.  "What are you talking about Sara?  Or who are you talking to?  And why are you on your knees?"

"Do you not remember?  You're the Prince of what citizens of Charissta call the 'Unknown Lands', more commonly known to you as Lathlialta.  You're destined to become High King."

"You're joking."

I rose to my feet and faced him.  "I most certainly am not!  You are the high king!  I need to get back to Charissta and return the eggs.  Would you like to accompany the Princess Sara back to her homeland?"

Jake raised an eyebrow.  "You, a princess.  That'll be the day."

“Shut up.  It’s true.  And like you, I didn’t know for most of my life.”

Jake turned back to the surrounding flora.  “I think there’s...” His voice trailed off and he surged forward through the underbrush.

“Jake?  Jake!  Where are you going?”  I tripped over branches that lashed out at me in his wake.  I scrambled to my feet and followed him again.

To be continued....
Buwahhaha!