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| Creating Great Characters |
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| Romance readers love books with great characters--people they can identify with, whose problems are the same real people might face, people they can sympathize with, who are likeable. But how do you get these great characters? There are plenty of things you can do to get your characters to come to life. What works for me is starting with a character chart. Mine is a compilation of several I found in writing books and was given at different writing workshops. I'll share the basics of it below, but you can take these and add or subtract things as you need to create your own. |
| **Character's Physical Appearance: eye/hair colors, height, weight, any scars, etc. **Character's Background: family, siblings, relationship with family members, hometown, etc. **Character's Traits: habits (ie, smoking, knuckle-cracking, etc), favorites (ie, clothing, reading material, foods, etc.), attitude (ie, optimist/pessimist, flaws, etc.) **Misc: goals, history, friends, job, etc. |
| Don't forget that your characters can't be perfect--who wants to read about a hero/ine who's perfect? Where's the conflict? No, we have to create characters who are flawed, just like the rest of us. We want the readers to be able to identify with the people in our books, to feel sympathetic, to want to know how this character is going to change his or her life and make it better. A couple of books I suggest for creating your characters: --The Complete Writer's Guide to Heroes and Heroines: 16 Master Archetypes by Tami Cowden, Caro LaFever, and Sue Viders --The Writer's Digest Character Naming Sourcebook by Sherrilyn Kenyon |