Problems With Creating Fictional Characters

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I'm a writer who is currently struggling to write his fourth book. I want to do things much differently than my other three works. Yet I'm having trouble with lots of aspects, such as making character. Someone told me that other people also have this problem.

Is it true that not everyone can create interesting characters? If not, why?

Let me tell you, I have had an immensely difficult time creating my own characters. It's taken me well over a year to perfect a single character. I've created a handful of other characters, but they're still pretty much one dimensional.

I'm not trying to discourage you or anything - just letting you know you're not the only one who has trouble with this sort of thing.

Let me tell you, I have had an immensely difficult time creating my own characters. It's taken me well over a year to perfect a single character. I've created a handful of other characters, but they're still pretty much one dimensional.

I'm not trying to discourage you or anything - just letting you know you're not the only one who has trouble with this sort of thing.

Let me tell you, I have had an immensely difficult time creating my own characters. It's taken me well over a year to perfect a single character. I've created a handful of other characters, but they're still pretty much one dimensional.

I'm not trying to discourage you or anything - just letting you know you're not the only one who has trouble with this sort of thing.

I have the worst time creating characters. I took the easy out and started writing fan fiction, pre-made characters= easy.

I have difficulty creating characters and continuing to stay interested in them for as long as would be needed. I'd advise you to try starting with a single personality trait or emotion that you can understand and relate to--no external circumstances at first. Ask questions and build from there; I find this effective, and you may as well.
I'd say the basics of creating an interesting character would be for you to be able to relate to them and be interested in them yourself, without making them a nearly entire insertion of an actual person (whether yourself or another).

holy triple post

Also you can flesh out the story/universe THEN add in the characters to fit in

I have an easy time making up characters so maybe I can help.

I'm not sure how others come up with their characters, but for me, I usually think of one starting just with the character's species. Soon after that comes their gender and a few things about them, then the more I think of the more the more I "get to know them" and sort of discover more ideas about the character that I use.

I usually start getting a good idea of the character within a few hours-but it usually takes a few days even weeks (depending on how often the character appears in the story and their importance to it) for them to become a very well-rounded character. And even after that, I keep adding ideas to the character as I go along.

The way I make up characters best is to, after I make up a few facts about them, imagine them in various different scenarios relating to the story they are in. Seeing as how stories are probably my biggest special interest, I pretty much obsessively imagine parts of my stories many different times of the day, and the majority of these parts end up unused, or as I like to call them, "deleted scenes", once I finally settle on the idea for a certain part I like best. However, all these "wasted scenes" that are in my mind or in my notebooks are great for developing characters. As I continue to imagine them I end up changing things about them, adding traits, until they really become the well-developed characters that are so fun to write about.

Now, names on the other hand...well, I'm terrible with that.

I find fan fiction characters to be fun to write and develop too. Who says those stories can't be creative!

*raises hand*

Now, before everyone dogpiles me, this is just my opinion, let me show my thinking...

They are creative yes, but creativity is something that just about anyone with an imagination can do. I feel that fanfiction aims lower than original fiction on the scale of achievement and how personal it is to the author.
Achievement wise, Few works of fanfiction are ever published, and most of those novels are commissioned, not simply sent to a publisher and printed. Most of it floats around the internet where it either inflates the writer's ego disproportionately to their actual achievement.
Next, you're using someone else characters (back on OT), which are deeply personal to the original creators. if you take someone elses' creation and try to imitate it, your own interpretation begins to bleed through, and the character is stuck in a sort of limbo of being faithful to it's original roots and being an entirely new and subjective interpetation of what it once was.
A lot of fanfic writers I've met on the internet tend to feel that thier fansubject, for want of a better word, is deeply personal to them, even though it was made by someone else. This is something I don't really understand. Most of the fun of creating somethign is coming up with all the elements and fitting them in, and morphing them till they suit to story's needs. if you have an object that has builtin parameters that deny you some level of reasonable control ( a character's personality and physical traits, for example) you walk the fine line of staying true to the original idea, and expressing some proper creative freedom.

That, and I just don't find it very fun.

But then I'm a literary elitist through and through.

Now I know this is going to rile a few fanfic writers here, but I feel the need to justify my opinions, so I wrote this to show why I feel the way I feel.

Please don't waste the skin on your fingers typing a TL;DR retort, I'm not trying to eradicate fanfic from the universe, I just stated my views.
If you don't like what I've written, you might as well jsut write 'I disagree' and be done with that, I'm too misanthropic to care for people who insult me for holding a different opinion or chain of reasoning to them.
Of course if you want to show your own reasoning, feel free, but please leave the flaming at the forum index

People will cruicify me for this, but I don't care. I make up my characters in two minutes. I don't sit down and plan their characteristics out. I have a rough idea in my mind of what they'll be like, and I just develop it from there as their part gets written in the story. I see it as building them up slowly, rather than trying to come with mindless statistics and details all at once. I've never had a problem with the method. At least, characters haven't turned out as endless clones of each other.

Kinda off topic, but since when is writing all about publishing? And since my current fanfiction uses only the creatures from a different world, I fail to see how that is "aiming lower" or is less creative than someone who writes about humans or animals in the real world. They didn't make up any of those things either. About using already made characters, I personally find well written fan fiction involving characters others made up to be more interesting than bland, unoriginal and cliche "original characters". What makes it enjoyable depends on the story and how the characters are written for me. I honestly don't care if you aren't fond of fanfiction, but the generalizing confused me. It came off as "writing is only good if it is published" to me, whether or not that was intended. Plus like I said, not all fanfiction involves characters you didn't made up, and in those cases I don't see why it is automatically deemed inferior. Nobody made up humans or forests or cities or stuff like that. *shrugs*


Out of both confusion and curiosity...what on earth are you jumping to these conclusions for? I honestly don't see why fanfic writers would feel angry about something some random person they don't know on the internet said about it, so I kinda feel like you wasted your time typing that there. I really don't see how your post is supposed to make people angry as you didn't come off as a jerk or anything.

A few points Huskywolf.

1. I stated that I am Elitist when I comes to publishing, but that's jsut my own view on the matter.

2. I had hoped I made clear why I believe it is less of an achievemnt

3. I personally, don't see how you can take somone elses' intimatly personal work that you only have a subjective view of and make it Objectivly better.

4. If you write as a hobby, that's fine, as I stated I'm not trying to eradicate fanfic from the universe, I just stated my views(on the subject).

5. why do you refer to me in a seemingly derogatory fashion as 'some person on the internet?' We're all 'some people on the internet' here, so our opinions should all be on equal grounds.

6. please don't say I've wasted my time, My kneejerk reaction is that it sounds like you're trying to shrug off my opinion as being worthless while yours is somehow superior.

I hope this clears a few things up.

I know that, but that's also saying that unpublished original fiction isn't as good, which didn't make sense to me as your argument was trying to say that original fiction was creative. I was thinking "Huh...?". If that's your opinion though, I think it's a weird one, but I respect it nonetheless.


You mean "achievement"? And yeah, you made it clear except for a few things I was confused about. Hence why I posted.


"Someone" "Intimately" and "Objectively". Sorry, I'm nit-picky about typos. And who said anything about "better"? Dunno where you got that from, but I sure didn't mean to imply that. I write fanfiction because it is fun, and I don't believe it isn't creative. As someone who writes stories as a hobby, both fanfiction and non-fanfiction, I wouldn't waste my time if I wasn't able to be creative with it. My view is that creativity can be everywhere in a story. The fact of whether the character is original or fanfiction don't make or break it for me-I take the plot, sub-plots, plot twists, new characters and settings, and of course the writing style into account as well.


Eh? I never said you were trying to eradicate it. Plus you already stated this in your first post. I didn't miss it.


Because you are "some random person on the internet" as am I to you. How is this offensive or implying that our opinions aren't equal? We don't know each other, so we are random internet strangers. Nothing derogatory about it, it's a fact.


You misunderstood me. I said that little bit at the end of your post was a waste of time-not the entire post. The reason I thought so was because it sounded to me like a disguise for "Oh no please don't flame me!" and it didn't make sense that someone who said they didn't care about being flamed would bother writing a disclaimer about it.