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Tips - Character
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2023-09-16 00:13:16If an outline is the back bone of a story, then the characters are the veins.
The whole story is presented through the characters' actions, decisions, and emotions, and it's the characters of a story that brings it to life.
Even if you can make a story work without an outline, you can't without characters.
For main characters, we will talk about characters in these parts: character setting, character arch, and character building. [TBC in case I missed some important parts]. Supporting characters will be simpler, and would only have one part about them.
1 Character Setting
2 Character Arc
3 Character Building
4 Supporting Characters
-----
1 Character Setting
This part provides the drive of your story to move forward, so it's VERY important, the kind of I-cannot-stress-enough important!!!
G00gle if you don't know what character setting is. Here I will give examples on how your CS (character setting drives your story forward), and explain why.
Eg.1 A pretty girl in school has a crush on the most handsome, popular boy. They meet and fall in love and get together after some interaction.
Eg.2 A pretty girl in school, who is responsible and innocent, meets a boy who is handsome, popular, but has horrible grades. They meet and fall in love and get together after some interaction.
Now imagine developing these two stories.
For the first story, you can use any and every plot you can design for a school love romance. Like how they would meet in the cafeteria, how they would go home together after school. But to create the same lure, the second story has a natural advance: their special settings -- she's responsible and he's a bad boy.
The simplest plot would be:
The teacher makes it her responsibility to help him with his homework, and being a bad boy with horrible grades, he doesn't want to.
There comes their conflicts, motives, and interactions. All naturally and at the same time, you have also created a clear expectation for your readers:
What would happen when they are after different things? Drama!
Find the right character setting for your story, and the story will move forward on it own~
2 Character Arc
[TBC]
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