: Re: Problems with character development? I'm 1/4 through my first novel, with a pretty solid 12 page outline of the whole thing. After years of reading books about story structure, I think I have

@Lee1909368

Making realistic characters starts with knowing them. Pick your top few characters, and write a character bio. To write a bio, you must answer some questions about your characters. Here is a non-exhaustive list of a few questions to answer about your characters:

Where were they born?
What kind of family did they grow up in?
What are their likes and dislikes?
What do they look like?
What are their core beliefs? (i.e. moral, religious, etc)
What do they sound like (voice, dialect, etc)
How do they interact with others?
What type of people do they have as friends?
What type of flaws do they have (everyone has them, and if your characters don't, they won't be believable.)
What is their back-story?
What culture did they grow up in?

Each question like this informs your characters, and provides a texture and richness.

Also, your main character should change through the course of the work. The typical method is giving your character a fatal flaw that he or she must overcome to achieve the goal of the story.

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@Lee1909368

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: Would a paid-for review from Kirkus give me real insight into quality of my manuscript? As an amateur writer who has just finished my first manuscript, I want a qualified, non-biased, and thorough

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: How to have a character be nameless for the first few paragraphs of a book? Let me first explain what is going in in the beginning of the story: My main character belongs to a tribal culture

: Re: Problems with character development? I'm 1/4 through my first novel, with a pretty solid 12 page outline of the whole thing. After years of reading books about story structure, I think I have

More posts by @Lee1909368

: Should a long flashback be written in first or third person? In my novel there will be a chapter-length flashback as one character relates a story from his past. The rest of the novel is

: Would a paid-for review from Kirkus give me real insight into quality of my manuscript? As an amateur writer who has just finished my first manuscript, I want a qualified, non-biased, and thorough

: Learning storywriting for videogames - Handling deep nonlinearities A recent question asked for pointers for writing for games, and the gist of the answers was that it's not very unlike writing

: How to have a character be nameless for the first few paragraphs of a book? Let me first explain what is going in in the beginning of the story: My main character belongs to a tribal culture

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