WRITING 7/2/12

 BUILDING A CHARACTER

Oddly enough I do some research for many of my characters. Truthfully it doesn’t seem like it at first but I do.

For the Faerie characters I look at lore and legends. It helps me give them an image. Some races are warrior some are trickster and some rare races are well defined. I have been using mostly Tuathe de Danaan but I have a few other races that I’m building for the stories. Generally the research gives me a few personality traits to use.

There are some characters I have that remind me of a ‘type.’ They may be a little stereotyped but that’s not the intent. Grandmothers and lounge singers fall into this category.

There are some characters that I used long ago that I may be refreshing and giving them more than they were. I’m doing it just because I liked the idea for the character but I didn’t have the skill at that time. They just appear out of thin air and they stayed thin and undeveloped.

Personal history for a character is the hardest because you have to give them a life before your story. I’m getting better at this but I still need the practice. Personal history also affects the personality so you can’t have one without the other. That’s what I lacked in my earlier writing.