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The Fan Fiction Mafia

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Pink Harzard

So majestic
Well, seems like I'm still a member here, so why not try to contribute a bit? Maybe I even post a story next year. The prologue is written and the first chapter is in progress, so maybe I post something new.

Distractions. What are the most common things that distract you from your writing? What tricks do you use for resisting your distractions and how well do they work? Do you have a good handle on your distractions or do they frequently get in the way of your writing?

My greatest distraction is THE INTERNET. Serious, I sometimes just turn off the internet on my laptop or I will end up doing something completely else. But I'm pretty easy distracted. However, writing works great through boring class. Still, distractions are the reason my stories die :/
 

gorgonfish

ribbit-ribbit
Distractions. What are the most common things that distract you from your writing? What tricks do you use for resisting your distractions and how well do they work? Do you have a good handle on your distractions or do they frequently get in the way of your writing?

Everything. When I watch/read/play something instead of not liking a part I'm always thinking of 'what if' scenarios that could fix it, or just make it weird enough that I end up liking it. So whenever I take a break from writing to enjoy a movie or tv show I start thinking of something else to write about. Worldbuild a little bit and write up a one page outline and put a chapter or two on ffnet and then a new thing pops up. Or I get stuck in the writing/planning stage and jump to another idea. The trick I'm trying to use is forcing myself to focus on one project and think solely about it. If a new idea creeps up, I just jot it down in a word doc and go right back to the first thing. Hopefully it works.
 

Umbramatic

The Ghost Lord
Distractions. What are the most common things that distract you from your writing? What tricks do you use for resisting your distractions and how well do they work? Do you have a good handle on your distractions or do they frequently get in the way of your writing?

Oh, god, the Internet. New Pokemon games and such too, but the internet is worse since I have a tendency to discover something new and shiny to write that gets me to lose interest in whatever I was writing before.

To counteract this, I typically close my browser or open a different one that just has music tabs whenever I need to enter SRS WRITAN MODE. It usually works, though often I get distracted again when I take a break.

But yeah, distractions are one of my many mortal nemesises as a writer.
 

flamebeam

DAYN-JUH ZONE!
Distractions. What are the most common things that distract you from your writing? What tricks do you use for resisting your distractions and how well do they work? Do you have a good handle on your distractions or do they frequently get in the way of your writing?

School. School, school, school. Honestly, I don't know how you guys do it. I'm assuming most of us here are students. I spend so much time in class and studying because, well, GPA is so ridiculously important for a pre-med. And when I'm not doing school, I'm probably eating. And when I eat, I watch Netflix or one of the many comic-based TV shows I'm watching this season. And when I don't do that, I'm on Facebook... a lot. It's where all my cool pages are (and I use "cool" loosely). And sometimes, I just do nothing, because the strain of life and thinking about life and thinking about the future and whether or not I'm doing things right makes me want to do nothing.

...So how do I "resist" these distractions? I don't. I recently edited the first chapter of my fic because I'm essentially "rebooting" it. I was supposed to be working on Chapter 2 today but I haven't because I just felt like relaxing today. I think daydreaming about my fic, especially when I shower (sorry about the water bill, roommates), keeps me from abandoning it, because there are so many practical reasons to give up. Coming here and reading your interesting posts also serves as motivation. As far as the success of these "tactics" go, it's not looking so well. I expect to have Chapter 2 posted by next weekend but it could just as likely be done after that.

Maybe one day, if I ever get my life together, I can be a more competent writer. Until then, I suppose.
 
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TheCharredDragon

Tis the Hour to Reload
Well, I can't say much since my main distraction is something else but it's mostly dedication. The only one I know of for sure that does that (through school) is Knightfall. Perhaps you could ask him when you get the chance? :/

But anyways...

Distractions. What are the most common things that distract you from your writing? What tricks do you use for resisting your distractions and how well do they work? Do you have a good handle on your distractions or do they frequently get in the way of your writing?

Well, my most common is...THE INTERNET, like many of us. The only time I really stop is when I'm told to. Other than that, there's music (sometimes) and noise. In the former, it's obvious on how to stop it (if I'm playing it) while I can't really do anything about the latter if it's someone building something. Well, at the moment, not really because I'm still waiting for my beta reader to finish "beta-ing" the chapter I sent. So, no. They don't really distract me, WHILE writing. It's starting to write is ny problem.
 

Sike Saner

Peace to the Mountain
Distractions. What are the most common things that distract you from your writing? What tricks do you use for resisting your distractions and how well do they work? Do you have a good handle on your distractions or do they frequently get in the way of your writing?

OKAY SO. You know how some folks can like, tune people out? Selective hearing and all that? Well, the thing is, I don't have it. If I hear people talking--if I so much as catch the sibilants hissing in my ears--those words'll mingle with the words in my head/on the page/in the document, and it all just turns into a huge, jumbled, overloaded mess. The kind of distraction going on is less like someone constantly changing the channel and more like someone trying to tune into a crapload of stations simultaneously.

That's wrt talking, anyway. Shapeless, rhythmless babbling does this (as does random-*** noise in general--I used to have the router up just a little too close to the speakers and sometimes there'd be this awful sputtering that may as well have been someone standing next to me going "pssst, hey, hey heyhey pssssst hey listen psst"). Singing often doesn't, so sometimes I can use music with vocals to drown all the random noises out. But I've got to be careful which music I pick when it comes to songs with words. Otherwise I just end up singing along, and since multitasking really isn't one of my strong suits, that slows my writing down to a crawl. Hence why I usually pick instrumental music, or else put on SimplyNoise or the like. (The white noise is a bit shrill and tinny for my liking, but pink and brown are nice.)

All that said, I do think these issues were more (or even more) of a problem in the past, back when I thought I needed the closest thing to ABSOLUTE PERFECT GODDAMN CONCENTRATION, like I had to use all of my mental faculties and then some, because OBVIOUSLY I could not afford to make even a single solitary infinitesimal mistake, or else I'd never get over the shame. I could say I was scared of effing up, but that'd be an understatement. So when I sat down to write something, I'd be tense as hell the whole time because I just knew that at any moment, along would come the noise that'd turn my thoughts into a damn drain clog and turn the story into a festering pile of "what the **** was she thinking". And it was kind of a self-fulfilling prophecy, I guess, because back when I was more worried about having my trains of thought derailed, it happened more easily.

Luckily I've since come by the luxury of not taking it so damn seriously anymore. Signals'll still cross, so to speak--I still need silence or at least relatively orderly noise to be able to concentrate well enough to write faster than molasses uphill. (Ever seen molasses write anything? Takes for damn ever.) But it's a lot less stressful than it used to be, and I no longer get distracted by the need to check and edit and make sure I'm not ruining my reputation with every other keystroke as I'm writing. I can write forward now rather than in circles. And I love it. :D
 

TrainerMaria

Fire Trainer
Distractions. What are the most common things that distract you from your writing? What tricks do you use for resisting your distractions and how well do they work? Do you have a good handle on your distractions or do they frequently get in the way of your writing?

I try to treat distractions like everything in life, with balance. Yes they can be evil and make things take even longer to complete or even push us to the point of rushing with little hope. Despite that though they are also necessary. Sometimes when you work on something for too long you can become stressed or just find yourself unable to work past a certain problem. Most of the time all you need to do is to distract yourself for a while and the longer you do the more it will help. Although it may sound like you are avoiding the problem it actually helps you to find a new and fresh perspective when you go back to it. This also helps a lot with art. The more you can change your perspective the more you will be able to see.

As for what distracts me, just about everything. I love to listen too music when I work but sometimes it's more distracting then helpful. Sometimes you have to tell yourself to just stick it out. Usually if I have to do that I give myself a promise that if I complete a certain goal then I will reward myself with something that I want. It works pretty well for me.
 

Starlight Aurate

Just a fallen star
Distractions. What are the most common things that distract you from your writing? What tricks do you use for resisting your distractions and how well do they work? Do you have a good handle on your distractions or do they frequently get in the way of your writing?
In addition with agreeing with TrainerMaria about how distractions can be good, I tend not to get distracted so much as I just put off my work. I'll think "Okay, I'm going to get X much done today!" And I open up my story, read through it, and just end up not doing anything. I t has to do with lack of motivation, and, I think most of all, just not being sure how to best write something out. I'll have a good scene planned in mind, but every time I go to it I just can't think of how best to go about it and turn away from it until it can come to me. It's definitely not the most efficient way of working, but I don't really know what else to do. And of course it'll go through about a billion revisions and re-writes until I actually decide to post, and even then I always feel like something is wrong with and am dissatisfied with the final product, but I just don't know what else to do except let others read it and ask them for help.

So, it's not so much distractions as it is my indecisiveness and lack of confidence.
 

TrainerMaria

Fire Trainer
I completely understand how you feel starliteevee. I use to suffer from that same problem with the story that I am currently working on. My biggest suggestion is to look at your story in a different way.

I currently have two notebooks that I am using for one story. One notebook I use for jotting down just about everything that is involved with the story. It's completely disorderly and all of it will probably never be encountered directly by the reader. All of it though affects the story.

For this story and probably most any story you should understand the things that happened in the past and even the things that are happening without the reader's knowledge. Even though the story may be in a limited point of view as a writer it helps if you are all knowing and try to keep it all in mind. Life is never just one simple line but a story is often limited to one. As a reader I believe that we witness this affect because we often learn with the main character. As a writer however I am learning to change that perspective by looking beyond the written story. Doing so has helped me too see my characters and story with greater depth; making my story naturally come togeather.

In my opinion blocks can happen for various reasons. Sometimes it's because we need a distraction and are simply stressing ourselves out. Other times it's actually because something else is lacking in your story. There is something that you need to develop further. Look at everything that is surronding the problem or even beyond. Perhaps get a separate book for organizing what information you have or even what you don't know. If you are looking at this from a writer perspective then try a reader's perspective (limit what you know to reflect the reader) and vice versa.

I tend to make my own explanations for things. Hopefully that helps you for the next time that you have that problem. As for the confidence it may be hard but try to forget about what's loved and what isn't and just look at your story. Whatever happens after it is written is beyond our control anyway. No amount of nit picking will ever change that. That was something that I had to learn myself.
 
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Starlight Aurate

Just a fallen star
For this story and probably most any story you should understand the things that happened in the past and even the things that are happening without the reader's knowledge. Even though the story may be in a limited point of view as a writer it helps if you are all knowing and try to keep it all in mind. Life is never just one simple line but a story is often limited to one. As a reader I believe that we witness this affect because we often learn with the main character. As a writer however I am learning to change that perspective by looking beyond the written story. Doing so has helped me too see my characters and story with greater depth; making my story naturally come together.

Thanks for the encouraging words :) I definitely make a world around my story; there's more to the characters and the word than I write in the actual story and post, and some of that stuff I think would be cool but I really have no reason to post it in my story. Funny thing is, as I made more of a world around my works, my characters and certain events changed completely. I intended to base the characters' personalities off of people I knew (bad idea, I know, but I didn't know what else to do at the time), but eventually they developed into their own people. I feel like this is something that typically happens, but either way I didn't think "X is going to have Y personality" and have it work out that way. The characters changed as the story changed, which made the characters change, which made me have to rewrite, which makes me want to go back and rewrite stuff I've already written, and... yeah :/ But I can definitely see where you're going with having a notebook. Should I try to plan out and write my story before I post? Because I tried doing that, and it still happened.

In my opinion blocks can happen for various reasons. Sometimes it's because we need a distraction and are simply stressing ourselves out. Other times it's actually because something else is lacking in your story. There is something that you need to develop further. Look at everything that is surronding the problem or even beyond. Perhaps get a separate book for organizing what information you have or even what you don't know. If you are looking at this from a writer perspective then try a reader's perspective (limit what you know to reflect the reader) and vice versa.
I almost think that distracting myself and taking a break from my story are worse; they make me forget and not look at it and then I have no motivation to go back to it for a while, and when I do get the motivation, the words I want to put down just won't come. I guess I'm... feeling without thinking in words? I don't know. I guess I often feel that my words don't convey everything that I want them to, and that my writing doesn't do my actual story justice. Though I definitely need to try reading it from a reader's perspective; I keep forgetting that they don't know stuff I forgot to mention -_-

I tend to make my own explanations for things. Hopefully that helps you for the next time that you have that problem. As for the confidence it may be hard but try to forget about what's loved and what isn't and just look at your story. Whatever happens after it is written is beyond our control anyway. No amount of nit picking will ever change that. That was something that I had to learn myself.
Thanks again :) It's so inspiring and at the same time terrifying to be on the same website as so many great writers. Every time someone reviews my work, my immediate response is "Oh no, they're going to tear my story apart and tell me it was terrible and I made a fool out of myself in front of everyone!" (which hasn't happened as much as I anticipated, lol). I really enjoy reading and reviewing everything the people here have to offer, but and while I want reviews in return, I'm terrified of them at the same time XD But I figure that I'll never get any better if I don't know what others think and take their advice.

So thanks again! It just takes a long time and it's stressful to deal with these things.
 

TrainerMaria

Fire Trainer
That's actually really good that you can prioritize information with your story, sometimes that can be really hard. It's also really normal for things to change as you proceed to learn more about the world that's involved. When I first started my story I thought that I knew where it was going and what to expect. At this point I feel that I am truly getting towards the end of the outline. I can honestly say that if you asked me when I first began that it would end up the way that it has, I wouldn't have believed it. I absolutely love it though far more then when I first started.

Basing personalities on real people isn't completely bad in my opinion. It can provide a good starting point which will most likely be altered or sometimes even scrapped altogether during planning. As for your current situation it all depends on what changes you have. Is there a way to actually allow the story to adopt the changes? Characters are essentially people and as time goes on or something happens their personalities can change. You can do it gradually or you could have something happen that would spark the change. It may be really challenging but it could be really worth it.

I mostly use my notebook for random notes or even sometimes excerpts. Right now one of my pages is devoted to a basic outline of my story. It literately is just a basic list of everything that happens - from beginning to end. In my case I plan on showing everything when it's all done so I can take my time with it. It seems like your focusing on a fan fiction right now which is normally a timed or steady release. You could use it to map out everything that will happen which might help with the changes that your facing. What I will say is, the more of the time that you fill in the better that you will be. You can also use it though to map out the chapter that you are working on. Once it's done all you have to do is follow the outline like a check list. If you still have changes, like I said before, try to see if you can work them in somehow.

Distractions are quite complicated and affect everyone differently. Sometimes while I'm distracted I will actually be thinking about my story or the situation that I'm trying to resolve. I'm a bit of a multitasker in the sense that distractions sometimes help me to focus better. Sometimes though they just allow my brain to rest and feel refreshed when I get back to what I was working on. It all depends on what works best for you.

Your welcome for the input and everything. I know that I have a long way to go myself. Hopefully any of this will help at all, I'm really just sharing what I have experienced. It can be really stressful at times but I honestly love writing which helps me to overcome the issues that come with it. It's never easy but as long as you enjoy it, it's definitely worth it. Good luck with everything!
 

Starlight Aurate

Just a fallen star
Basing personalities on real people isn't completely bad in my opinion. It can provide a good starting point which will most likely be altered or sometimes even scrapped altogether during planning. As for your current situation it all depends on what changes you have. Is there a way to actually allow the story to adopt the changes? Characters are essentially people and as time goes on or something happens their personalities can change. You can do it gradually or you could have something happen that would spark the change. It may be really challenging but it could be really worth it.
Yeah, the story can definitely adapt. It's not as if they're huge, plot-altering changes, but they do change who the characters are and I feel like the personalities of the characters are an important part of the story. My problem is that with the changes that might appear with upcoming chapters, they contradict how the character acts in earlier chapters... but I really don't want to change that because that would be altering a large chunk of my fic. Agh, laziness >_<

So, this brings to mind a question that I'm curious how you all will respond to:
How do you make your characters?
Do you base them off of people you actually know, do you build them around a situation (tragic past, dangerous situations), do you prefer your bad guys to be unambiguously evil, or for everyone to have shades of black and white?

I personally prefer my characters to have a bit of both; as far as I can see (barring religious subjects), no human is truly good or truly evil, and as I want my characters to be as realistic as they can, I try to reflect that on to them. Like I said, I began with basing my characters' personalities off of people I knew to try and make them seem realistic, but they just developed on their own without my meaning it to happen.

So what about you? How does your character-making process go, and what types of characters do you prefer to make?
 

Pink Harzard

So majestic
How do you make your characters?
Do you base them off of people you actually know, do you build them around a situation (tragic past, dangerous situations), do you prefer your bad guys to be unambiguously evil, or for everyone to have shades of black and white?


Often characters have bits of people I know, but I also base them on past events. Sometimes I like to contradict with what most people think about a character. For that last one I have the example of a Spritzee who hates to be called cute and likes to live dangerously.
I just take a character in my head and put it in different situations to see how he/she reacts. Characters also change and grow during a story. Making them do other things then they would at the start of the story.

I don't think somebody can be compleately good or evil. For example a guy who commits several murders but also loves his son and actually seeks power in the wrong way, only so he can protect his little boy.

Maybe this is a bit short, but these are my thoughts about it.
 
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Negrek

Lost but Seeking
Pink Hazard said:
For example a guy who commits several murders but also loves his son and actually seeks power in the wrong way, only so he can protect his little boy.
Hmm, that's interesting. Personally, I tend to define people as good or evil based on their actions rather than their motivations. Killing someone else, barring some extenuating circumstances, is something I'd consider an evil act, and someone who tends to commit evil acts I'd in turn label "evil." I'd say that the character having someone he wants to protect humanizes him, maybe makes him more relatable than someone who just goes on a killing spree for the evilulz, but doesn't actually make them any less evil. If he were good, he would go about getting power in the right way if he thought he needed it to protect his son.

Not saying your interpretation is wrong; it's just intersting to me how hard it is to define "good" or "evil" and how much people can differ in their interpretations of them.

How do you make your characters? Do you base them off of people you actually know, do you build them around a situation (tragic past, dangerous situations), do you prefer your bad guys to be unambiguously evil, or for everyone to have shades of black and white?

I don't really make characters so much as characters happen to me. I'll be writing a scene where I need a character to appear--a trainer to be fought, a pokémon to capture, some shopkeeper or other NPC to interact with--I just write along with the first characteristics that come to mind. They'll take on some small quirks just as a matter of course, and the more I work with them, the more those quirks will deepen and be refined to create the full character, if they're going to stick around for more than a few lines. Sometimes a character comes to me quite unexpectedly and more or less with a complete personality, which actually happened to me while working on NaNoWriMo this year, but even then I continue to learn more about them as I write. Overall it's a subconscious, intuitive, iterative process, and sometimes my conception of a character can change dramatically from when I first start writing about them to the end of the story.

Once I've got a reasonably-developed character, I have a lot of fun analyzing them, enumerating their strengths and weaknesses, figuring out what Hogwarts house they'd be in, that kind of thing, but I don't work forward from a set of traits; it's a destructive exercise rather than a constructive one. So I don't really do any "building," as such, and while my characters no doubt have some source of inspiration, whether someone I know in real life or a character in another work, that's only something I can recognize in hindsight.

For the most part this works pretty well for me, but unfortunately it can lead to a lot of characters who have broadly similar traits--there are just some character type I enjoy working with, and so my brain grabs onto them first when trying to fill a blank spot in the narrative. If the characters get enough screentime they'll usually diverge far enough that it's not a big deal, but minorish characters often suffer a bit. This is why I tend to end up with piles and piles of snarky wise-talkers.

Generally I prefer characters who have what I consider to be realistic motives and struggles, but I don't mind labeling some of them unambiguously "good" or "evil." An evil character isn't going to spend every waking moment kicking puppies or something, just as a good character doesn't have to be anything like a perfect saint, but I don't mind working with characters that I would call "unambiguously evil." The stories I've written so far have called for characters that have messy alignments--where it can be difficult to tell who the good guys are, if any, and where characters may change alignments over the course of the narrative--and without clear villains, but I wouldn't mind doing a story with more of a clear-cut "big bad" figure. I just haven't been inspired to write any thus far. I've actually been kind of been toying with writing a story about a more "traditional" hero--much with the goodness, doesn't compromise on their principles, self-sacrificing to a fault--recently, maybe as a reaction to writing so many terrible people in my current fanfic.
 
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Dragonfree

Just me
How do you make your characters? Do you base them off of people you actually know, do you build them around a situation (tragic past, dangerous situations), do you prefer your bad guys to be unambiguously evil, or for everyone to have shades of black and white?

My experience is pretty much exactly like Negrek's: I don't deliberately set out to construct characters that are a certain way so much as writing in vaguely-defined blobs that happen to have certain traits and then extrapolating and discovering more about the character from there.

So, like, one of my favorite characters to write is Dave from Morphic. The precise moment Dave came into existence was when I was starting to write the first chapter, still not sure anything would really become of this silly idea of mine that I'd barely even started developing properly, and spontaneously wrote a line about how much the POV character wished "Dave" had gone to this television debate about abortion instead of him. Now, that line was mostly about the POV character being nervous, but as a side-effect it also created a Dave. Who was this Dave person? Well, apparently he was somebody who'd be good at debating abortion on TV, so he'd have to be a pretty confident, opinionated guy who probably believes they're in the right and could argue it all day. Obviously he had to be somebody also heavily involved with the whole Pokémorph debacle. Then it seemed to fit pretty well for this Dave guy to be the mastermind behind the whole thing - I mean, that kind of confident, opinionated personality is the leader type. Another spontaneous line revealed Dave had had the idea for the whole thing while drunk, and implied that's not uncommon, so maybe he was something of an alcoholic. And then the POV character went on to lose the debate horribly, and surely Dave, who was supposedly actually decent at debates, and had come off as kind of irritable in the little snippet I'd written of him in there, would be pretty annoyed about that. So at the end of the chapter Dave called him to chew him out, and in the process he used a relative lot of swear words, which also told me something about him. I was having a lot of fun writing him, so I decided I wanted to focus a bit more on him, and over the next several chapters, his personality kind of snowballed itself together as little spontaneous things combined with everything that was already established. He'd spontaneously do things that were kind of odd and I'd ask myself why he'd do that and from there I'd gain a little bit of insight into his psychology that strengthened my sense of who he was and what might have made him that way. And long story short, today I could write entire essays about the inner workings of his psyche, but I didn't decide any of it at any point. Dave was just the guy Brian thought should have gone to the debate. The rest was all spontaneous happenings and me trying to figure out what they meant.
 
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Umbramatic

The Ghost Lord
How do you make your characters? Do you base them off of people you actually know, do you build them around a situation (tragic past, dangerous situations), do you prefer your bad guys to be unambiguously evil, or for everyone to have shades of black and white?


Hmm, this was a good one to think about. Personally I tend to start with a general idea (EG. a non-stereotypical Hydreigon) or a few traits (EG. a young woman who's a Water monotyper and has a supernatural secret not even she knows) and build on them from there depending on how important they are to the story and/or how much I like writing for them.

As for villains, I like writing for any with a real personality, though moreso the unabashedly evil or close. My heroes and villains do tend to be pretty clear-cut most of the time, though, mostly because I don't want to accidentally create unsympathetic heroes.
 

Griff4815

No. 1 Grovyle Fan
How do you make your characters? Do you base them off of people you actually know, do you build them around a situation (tragic past, dangerous situations), do you prefer your bad guys to be unambiguously evil, or for everyone to have shades of black and white?


My experience is similar to Negrek and Dragonfree. I start with a few qualities of a character and build them from there, discovering more and figuring out their complexities as I go along, and I think it's worked out for me so far. The characters reveal themselves to me more than any huge, active role on my part. I don't like to base characters off of real people because that just doesn't gel with me for some reason. I like to have characters that I can say I truly created. As for villains, I only very rarely have completely evil and deplorable antagonists. On the other hand, I don't try to go out of my way to say, "everyone is morally grey and to think otherwise is naïve". I'm less concerned with morality and more concerned with making the characters real. It's possible for there to be completely noble protagonists, but it's also possible for a noble protagonist to be backed into a corner or put in a situation where they can lash out or do something that isn't always morally right. Likewise for villains, I find people being evil for the sake of being evil or for no real reason stated hard to logically swallow. There's always a motive for antagonists but they can range from being very immoral to a noble kind of antagonist. It all depends on the character.
 
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gorgonfish

ribbit-ribbit
How do you make your characters? Do you base them off of people you actually know, do you build them around a situation (tragic past, dangerous situations), do you prefer your bad guys to be unambiguously evil, or for everyone to have shades of black and white?

It's different every time just because I'm always looking for new ways to create characters. There's a fantasy author, Brandon Sanderson (who films his college creative writing classes on youtube), that has a cool method I like to use to define characters. I don't remember all the steps, but it's basically brainstorming your various characters walking through a market place and having each of them notice and react to different things based on their traits. A trainer, breeder, and professor would all be drawn to different things or notice different qualities in the pokemon they see and so forth.

I don't really base my characters off of people I know because most of them are boring. If they tap into a specific trope I'll look at other characters that share it just to see how it's been used before.

The villains I want depend on the type of story. It usually ends up being one or two on either end of the good/evil spectrum and everyone else somewhere between the two ends.
 

Creepychu

The horror
How do you make your characters? Do you base them off of people you actually know, do you build them around a situation (tragic past, dangerous situations), do you prefer your bad guys to be unambiguously evil, or for everyone to have shades of black and white?

My process is a lot like what other people have already described. I start out with one or a few character ideas I'm interested in writing about, then as I write I will inevitably need more characters for them to interact with, at which point I'll just create simple foil characters to fulfill whatever functions I need. As I write out a scene, I always try to find a clear voice for each character distinct from the others, and as I do that a lot of little personality traits and quirks tend to develop out of it. Over time, certain behaviors and responses just start feeling right for this character or that, and once that has happened the rest tends to come naturally. I wouldn't call it a process of discovery per say since most of my character are certainly created intentionally and often for a very specific plot purpose, but much like with my scenes, the idea I have in mind when I first start writing my characters is often very different from what I end up committing to the page.

As for my bad guys? Since I usually make characters to fit a function, I've kind of gotten used to just calling them 'antagonists', to be honest. From the protagonist's perspective most of them are pretty clear-cut bad guys, but since I prefer to write my protagonists themselves at least a bit flawed, the bigger picture is usually a bit more ambiguous than that. For me, half the fun in writing antagonists is in trying to puzzle out a way for them to become what they are that not only fits but also makes a certain kind of sense as you figure it out, whether it's because they genuinely feel they are acting for some greater or long-term good (and have legitimately ruled out more sensible options), because they think they're settling for the lesser of two evils, because they're simply trying to get by themselves, or because they did something that felt like a good idea at the time but then got out of hand. In particular, I have a soft spot for antagonists who've done terrible things, acknowledge that they've done terrible things, and yet keep on doing those terrible things anyway not because 'eeeeevil muahahaaa' but because they've talked themselves so far into it that they feel they can't back away. There's just so many ways that kind of character can go (for better and worse), and it's fertile ground for all kinds of backstories.

For more bit-part antagonists who aren't getting much depth added, I still tend to favor characters who are more on the inconsiderate douche side of the scale than the maniacally cackling puppy-kicker end. Charismatic narcissists, devious snake-oil salesmen, cold professionals, desensitized grunts and just plain rude, inconsiderate people are all more satisfying to write for me because they all have a human aspect to them that makes it plausible for me to believe that they can still function somehow in day-to-day life, but the kind of blatant almost exhibitionist antagonism where the villains make a big show of displaying how eeevil they are is something I only ever do for comic effect, such as if the point of the character is to show that it's an exaggerated act they're putting on based on what they think a member of an evil team or whathaveyou should be like. Besides, antagonists are a ton of fun for me to write, so even if I start out with the intention of creating a simple, clear-cut bad guy, the end result is usually a bit more humanized than that.

As to whether I base characters off myself or people I know? Not consciously, no; that'd just feel too weird for me. In retrospect, I can recognize bits or pieces of characters that are similar to someone I know, but the character as a whole is definitely their own entity.
 
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DarkerShining

Well-Known Member
How do you make your characters? Do you base them off of people you actually know, do you build them around a situation (tragic past, dangerous situations), do you prefer your bad guys to be unambiguously evil, or for everyone to have shades of black and white?

Hmm... I guess I start out with a few basic concepts for the characters and then build on them from there. As I write out their stories, I end up learning more about them and discovering sides to them that I didn't initially think of. Of course, there are also a few instances where a character has ended up being very different from what I originally envisioned them as, due to changes to the plot during the writing process, thus altering the character's role. However, I feel most of the changes I've made are for the best, and one of the characters who was changed from that process ended up being much more interesting and fleshed out than what I originally planned.

As for villains, I'm not too sure how well I handle those just yet. To begin with, I was worried that the villain of PMD: Reflecting Balance was too generic and stuff, and I wasn't really sure how to really flesh him out. However, the changes that were made to the plot over time also ended up benefitting the villain, and I was able to finally get a better idea of just what this villain was really like.

Since I haven't written for that many villains, I'm not really sure what kind of villains I prefer writing about. Although, I guess I know what kind of villains I enjoy watching on TV shows and such, so I guess that at least gives me some ideas of types of villains I might want to try writing in the future.
 
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