How I Write My Characters

This time, we'll talk about how I write my characters. If you haven't read my last post about the creative process of my stories, I recommend doing so first to make this post even more interesting.

Ingredients to create a character

First of all, I make a list of "ingredients". There are no good or bad ingredients; There are only ingredients. Some may be harder to match, but that doesn't matter. Remember, I always "cook" only for myself, so you too should cook only for yourself. No one but you should like your dish, since you will be the one who prepares it and the first to eat it. So why not prepare something you like?

For me, characters are like different dishes. A protagonist can be a sweet dish, and an antagonist can be a savory dish. But, you can still add a little salt to your cookies to enhance the flavor, and at the same time, your spicy dish can have a little sugar to balance it.

List of ingredients

In my first post about how I wrote my stories I listed:

Things I like.

Things that I dislike.

Things that scare me.

And based on this we made our recipe. These things listed served as the ingredients to prepare the dish/story. But in the case of how to make a character, we are going to use these same ingredients and add qualities, defects, and desires that you, your family, and close friends have.

Ingredients for your characters.

Things you like.

Things you dislike.

Things that scare you.

Things you like about yourself.

Things you dislike about yourself.

Things you would like to have.

How you behave when you are alone.

How you behave with people you like.

How you behave with people you dislike.

How you behave with your superiors (bosses, parents, elders).

How you behave with your inferiors (small children, pets, people with a lower position than you at work).

Things you like about yourself, a family member and/or close friend.

Things you dislike about yourself, a family member and/or close friend.

Things that you have seen that you, a family member and/or close friend would like to have.

Bad experiences that you, a family member and/or close friend have experienced.

This is the list that I use to create my characters, and I give it to you hoping that it will help you, but remember, YOU DO NOT HAVE TO FILL IN ALL THE POINTS, you can even take the 3 that caught your attention the most and fill them with everything that occurs to you. With that you will have a lot of material to work with. Once you have all your ingredients ready, you can select them and mix them to make your characters.

In any case, a character could love something that you hate or feel uncomfortable with and vice versa. Or they could have something you want and another character could have the opposite or negative part of it and with this you would make your list grow twice as much. If you add the opposite part of the points you have written on your list, it will grow twice as much, for example: if you love cars, one of your characters could love cars too and another could hate them or maybe work with them and be a very good driver or mechanic even if he don't like them at all.

If you are very tall, one character of yours could also be very tall while another could be very short.

Let's do an example with my Visual novel "Wet Nightmares" that you may like. I am going to list my qualities with some of the points above.

Things that I like about myself.

-I am very polite when I meet someone older than me.

-I am very quiet when I walk.

-I always have my hair down.

Things that I dislike about myself.

-I don't have any hobbies so I get nervous if I'm not working.

-I would like to explode to get out what I feel inside but I hate making people uncomfortable so I don't.

-When I'm under a lot of stress I function very well but I have nightmares every day.

Things I would like to have.

-Have an athletic and attractive body.

-To have a lot of money.

-Have a house to myself.

-Have a calm attitude.

These are things that I have listed only for myself, but you can do it with a family member or a friend, or even someone you don't like.

If I take the quality of "To have an athletic and attractive body" (a Joseph's quality), I can put the negative of that which would be a thin and almost skeletal body to another character (a Samara's quality)

Or for example, if I take the fact of "being very polite when I meet someone older than me" (a Samara's quality), the counterpart of that would be to be equal and rude to anyone because of so many bad experiences in their past (a Joseph's quality).

You don't necessarily have to make counterparts with everything. You can simply put one quality on one character and a completely different one on another. For example:

Samara:

She is very quiet when she walks.

She always has her hair down.

She has a calm attitude.

She would like to explode to get out what she feels inside her, but she hates making people uncomfortable so she doesn't.

Joseph:

He has a lot of money.

He has a house to himself.

He doesn't have any hobbies so he gets nervous if he isn't working.

When he is under a lot of stress he functions very well but has nightmares every day.

As you can see, you can make very varied characters simply with your own qualities, defects, and desires.

Maybe you are thinking, "Hey Erkerut, maybe that's great for you, but I'm really boring, I don't have any friends and I only have my mom in my life." That's OK; as a person, you can list at least 40 things about yourself and 40 about your mother or anyone else, that's enough to write a total of 1600 characters. And even if you only take a tenth of the mixes you can do to avoid being repetitive, that would still be a total of 160 characters, which is still a lot.

Name a work that has built an entire universe, such as The Lord of the Rings, Star Wars, Harry Potter, A Song of Ice and Fire (Game of Thrones) or Dune. Even though these universes have hundreds of characters, sometimes more than a thousand, you could hardly name more than 100 characters as a fan. So don't worry about that, the secret is not to make a great character that makes you earn a lot of money, the secret is to be happy with the character you have created since that will make you treat it with care and affection and take the time to cook it properly.

I once showed a teacher a paranormal story about a guy involved in the mafia, and he asked me if I knew any person involved in the mafia. And I said "of course not!!", and he said, "How are you going to write a character that you've seen absolutely nothing of in real life?" It will be the flattest character in life.

I decided not to be an edgy teenager at that time and followed his advice. So I started creating characters with qualities and flaws that I, my family and my friends had and I ended up getting an A in that class. 🤣

The secret for "good cooking" (creating stories, from my perspective) is using ingredients you've been exposed to your entire life. Which are qualities, defects and desires of you, your family and close friends. I am Mexican, so of course I will use chili in my dishes. But you can't use jasmine rice or Thai curry paste if you're Mexican because you don't know those ingredients. I mean, of course you can, and if that makes you happy you shouldn't care if people don't like the result since you're cooking just for yourself. But the main goal is that, apart from the fact that you like it, cooking is easy and that you continue cooking until the end, instead of abandoning everything halfway through preparation because the dish is becoming too complicated.

Characters You've Never Seen

If you want to write about a character from a life you haven't seen, it's not going to be as genuine as if you wrote about something known. But that can be fixed by researching the lives of people who lead a life similar to that of your character. Wanna write about someone that is involved in Mafia but you don't know any Mafia lord? Just start a research about the life of 3 persons that was Mafia lords and combine that with the previous points from above. And Voilá!

I really hope this post helps you since it was really difficult to put it as short as possible to make it easier to read.

Also, if some of you want any advice, you can contact me and I'll be happy to help.