How I Create and Develop Characters

by guest author Tyrean Martinson 

“Shadow Girl” - Photo Credit: Anna Martinson

1.      The character pops into my head, usually after I’ve asked myself a “what if” question about something:

·         What if the victim of bullying is bullied by shunning because of something dangerous he did as a child? (“Seedling”)

·         What if a young swordswoman becomes the unexpected recipient of a blade of power that others think should belong to them? (original prompt for Champion in the Darkness)

·         What if a reluctant young bride has woven protection for herself into her traditional bridal gown? (Current WIP)

2.      The “what if” question creates spin-off questions for me:

·         What did the bullying victim do to be shunned? What if he wanted to change?

·         What if the swordswoman’s country was attacked before she received the blade of power?

·         Why is the bride reluctant? What if she’s being “sold” into a polygamous marriage? What if her wedding party is attacked by bandits?

3.      I start to create character profiles. I don’t worry about getting everything down, but I want to know these areas:

·         Name

·         Family “status” and who their family members are, if that’s important to the story

·         His/her place in their society

·         His/her strengths and at least one weakness

·         His/her heart’s desire in the scope of the story

·         I work on the physical attributes next, but this one stumps me sometimes because my descriptions seemed to start sounding alike from character to character.

As I write the story, I add to the character profiles.

4.      I pick images for my character. I look for:

·         Facial features that stand out

·         Outfits that my character would wear

·         Weapons they might or might not carry - briefcase, backpack, musical instrument or sword?

·         Vehicle they might drive/fly/own/want

“Sunbeam” Photo Credit: Tyrean Martinson

·         General images that might capture how the character sees the world

“Through the Fence” - Photo Credit: Tyrean Martinson

For all of these, I use pinterest and take some of my own photos. I know I’m not great at physical descriptions, so this step has huge importance for me, and I often create collages that I print out and stick to my wall above my desk.

5.      If I’m struggling with a character, I write “out of book” scenes that take me back to his/her childhood, or take me to a scene that would never actually happen in the book. I ask myself more questions along the way:

·         Why does this character hate the color orange? Did that come from a childhood incident of some kind? What other ways did that incident change this character?

·         OR What would a sword-wielding fantasy heroine do if she landed in the local McDonald’s or Starbucks with her best friend? What if she landed there with her enemy? What would she do there and why?

Other variations on how I create and develop characters:

1.      I find a picture first and start asking questions about the person in the image.

2.      I watch a few movies in the same genre and listen for dialogue pacing. (This is an area I hope to expand on in the next year or so since I struggle with creating dialogue.)

  

Tyrean Martinson

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Latest Book: Flicker: A Collection of Short Stories and Poetry is an exploration of many characters and their views of the world. 

How do you create and develop characters?

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Ideas in the bottom of our shoes

Image credit: earl53 at morguefile.com

Years ago I picked up a gem at a used bookstore, Georgia Heard's Writing Toward Home. The title spoke to my identity crisis of the moment: My parents had retired to Florida, overwhelming me with a sense "you can't ever go home again." Heard's pithy and poetic chapters on developing a creative life are worth savoring. In a chapter entitled "Where does poetry hide?" she includes this poem:

Valentine for Ernest Mann
by Naomi Shihab Nye

You can't order a poem like you order a taco.
Walk up to a counter, say "I'll take two"
and expect it to be handed to you
on a shiny plate.

Still, I like your spirit.
Anyone who says, "Here's my address,
write me a poem," deserves something in reply.
So I'll tell you a secret instead:
poems hide. In the bottoms of our shoes,
they are sleeping. They are the shadows
drifting across ceilings the moment
before we wake up. What we have to do
is live in a way that lets us find them....
(Qtd. in Heard, Georgia. Writing Toward Home. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 1995. p. 10.)

I found tremendous encouragement in Heard's commentary on it. She says, "We don't necessarily need to change our lives around to be writers or to be writing more. We must change the way we look at our lives. By looking at the small, everyday circumstances and happenings, we find ideas to fill volumes."

Where have you found poetic or fictional material hiding in the everyday? Have you ever had a change in perspective--how you look at your life--that opened up a well of ideas for you?

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A satchel of summer writing prompts

Seasonal prompts can be helpful in your routine, to get you paying attention to your immediate environment and the sensory experiences you can collect. It can also get you thinking about story potential in everyday events. Consider how to spin theses prompts for different genres or milieus. For example, try "the hottest day I've experienced" as memoir, as dystopian fiction, as magical realism, as SciFi, or as middle grade humor.

Photo by http://morguefile.com/creative/pippalou

I know summer has arrived when...

My idea of a perfect summer day is...

Smells I associate with summer.

Summer foods I have been craving for months.

How my protagonist's neighborhood changes in summer.

A homesick kid at sleepaway camp misses….

Someone added a mysterious chemical to the neighborhood pool, causing….

My worst family vacation disaster.

A homicidal maniac uses an ice cream truck to lure out victims.

What my protagonist likes most and least about summer.

Your best friend / worst enemy gets pushed into a pool at a fancy party.

Instead of selling ice cream, the roving musical truck in this neighborhood offers _____.

The hottest day I’ve ever experienced.

The boys’ and girls’ summer camps go to war.

A flea market purchase turns out to have magical powers.

While backpacking through Europe, a group of friends accidentally kills one of their own

A child and his/her cousin are stuck at a remote cabin for the summer with their grandparents and discover….

A tiger gets loose at the local county fair.

My favorite summer supper.

My protagonist’s idea of a wonderful summer vacation.

A horseback riding trail takes a group of riders magically back in time.

An unlikely ensemble takes shelter in a minimart during a hurricane.

Scientists discover what fireflies are actually communicating through their blinking bodies.

A new swimwear trend nobody could have predicted.

My best summer vacation memory.

A pie-eating contest goes horribly wrong.

The summer all the beaches were empty because….

How my protagonist would feel about going to a public pool in a swimsuit.

Two polar-opposite families are double-booked for a beach house rental and decide to share it.

The song of the cicada is actually a secret message

How three ingenious Girl Scouts saved the cook-out.

An inventor creates an ingenious new way to cool off in the summer.

Which of these appeals most to you?

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Maps of your world: tips for creating fictional lands

Months ago, I wrote a post about mapping interior spaces for your fiction. I'd fully intended to post next about building fictional outdoor environments, then realized I don't know anything about this topic! So I was delighted to discover a mapmaker offering her services to the author collective I participate in. And I'm even more delighted that she's willing to come here to share her tips on beginning to develop a map for your imagined world. Take it away, Angie....

By guest author Angie Grigaliunas

mapping helps you visualize your created world.

As a visual person, I’ve always been interested in maps. I created maps for most of the stories I started, and I worked for hours in Paint tweaking every little detail. As I’ve grown in both my writing and map-making, I decided to branch out and start helping others with their maps. I am by no means an expert, and I still have a lot to learn, but here are some tips to help you create a visual of your world.

One of the best parts for me in either writing or map-making is creating a new world. I can decide everything about it. It can also be daunting – trying to figure out landscapes, mountains, coastlines – especially when you don’t know where to start.

I personally always start with a land mass or continent. For the shape of this, check out actual countries and continents. Take note of how rugged or smooth the coastlines are and if there are islands. Drawing inspiration from real life creates a natural realism. Another great thing to try is searching for pictures of rust and using that shape as inspiration. Erosion works a similar way in both rust and land. You can also do this with a country, but country boarders are often affected by things other than natural causes (politics, for instance).

A basic land mass

Next, I place mountains. Most simply, mountains form where two tectonic plates move against each other (so it may be a good idea to figure out where those plates are in your world and create mountains along those lines). They’re not random, and islands will typically follow this same line. Mountains can cause rainshadows (a dry area on the leeward side of the mountain), so if you want deserts, decide which direction the weather in your world comes from and put your desert on the protected side of your mountains.

Mountain placement is based on tectonic plates lying beneath them.

After mountains, I start adding water. Some things to keep in mind here:

~Water flows toward the lowest point, away from mountains

~Rivers connect; they typically do not divide (unless there is a man-made reason, for instance)

~Lakes/ponds can have numerous rivers feeding them, but they can’t have more than one outgoing stream (as there is only one lowest point)

Rivers, flowing downhill from the mountains to the sea.

After that, I add forests and start deciding where I want my cities to be.

Forests spring up once you have water sources

People build where they have access to key resources.

For me, as an artist, it helps if someone has something drawn out – to the best of their abilities – with details such as mountains, lakes, rivers, cities, etc. That way I can more or less copy their world and put my touches on it instead of creating it from scratch and hoping it matches their vision. So if you’re planning to have someone make a map for you, do your best to draw something out. (It can also help you learn about your world! Win-win!)

When creating a map of your world, keep your people groups/races in mind. This gets into more world-building stuff, but if most of your people are nomads, for instance, you likely wouldn’t have any big metropolitan type area. Or if your nation is a big farming nation, there likely won’t be a ton of mountains – it’ll be flatter land, more field-like.

The best advice I can give is to research geography and study maps! Look at real countries and note how the mountains cut across the land, how the rivers flow, how the coastline changes.

For further research, check out Brandon Sanderson’s World Building Geography lecture series

If you have any questions or would like to solicit my map-making services, you can contact me at my facebook site, Your World Designed.

Angie Grigaliunas is a fantasy writer (mature content and themes) and blogger. She loves Jesus, the woods, and the stars, and has always wanted to be a superhero with a secret identity. She lives in Ohio with her dear husband, their puppy, and their crazy cats. You can follow her on Twitter at @Angie_ZeWriter.




How might mapping your fictional world help you better understand it? Any questions for Angie?

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On the move! Recent appearances around the Web

Image by 5demayo at morguefile.com

I am out and about sharing the news of my new release Almost There with new readers. But I thought you lovely folks might be interested in seeing excerpts and interviews and some thoughts on developing a character's faith.

Writer's Alley

As part of her regular feature "YA in the Alleyway," Sheri Larsen interviewed me about Almost There--my writing process, setting, characters, and what's next.

She is also hosting a giveaway of  the prequel Never Gone. Just leave a comment on the post for a chance to win! 

Check it out HERE.

Author spotlight with Catherine Bennett

Catherine writes Christian romances and invited other faith writers to share a bit about their new releases this summer.

There I share one of the romance scenes from Almost There. As you might guess from the book blurb, Dani gets into some romantic messes in this story. Long-term dating relationships take work, and even the best ones can suffer serious shake-ups in the midst of family crises and separation.

Check it out HERE

Haven of Hope

My approach to writing Christian YA has been to write a character for whom faith is a natural part of life. It’s Dani’s framework for understanding the world, just like her artistic ability is. The imagery and stories of her faith weave through her thought world as much as the language of painting and drawing.

In my guest post for Shayla Hilton's blog "Haven of Hope," I talk about the hope that we, like Dani, can draw from  not only knowing specific verses in the Bible, but also drawing parallels between our experiences and those of Bible characters. Which Bible prophets inspire Dani to do the right thing when she'd rather run?

Check it out HERE


What are you up to these days?

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Sci Fi isn't just for techies: Interview with author Aubrey Hansen

Science fiction is one of those genres I really enjoy reading but have always been too intimidated to write. But not all compelling stories of future worlds and interplanetary travel require you to have degrees in physics, aerospace engineering, xenobiology, and the like (but an interest in topics like this certainly don't hurt). With some very basic aspects of your future world researched, you can write a compelling story that focuses on the human interactions rather than the tech, what is sometimes called "soft" science fiction (versus "hard" --the very tech focused).

As part of her blog tour, author Aubrey Hansen has come to share some insights into creating Red Rain, a Christian "soft" science fiction novella. Take it away, Aubrey....

Good morning, Ladies and Gents! Welcome aboard Flight 74 heading for the Red Planet, Mars. Please strap on your seat belts because this promises to be one wild ride. We've got free books galore, three fun giveaways, an author interview, and more. Let's get this adventure started!

Interview with the Aubrey Hansen, author of Red Rain

What are some key aspects of the future world you've created?

The key aspect—the one that inspired the whole book, actually—was the idea that my character lived under an oppressive government that forced kids to attend public school. These were the thoughts that terrified my fourteen-year-old mind! Although the world has developed to include a lot more political intrigue—especially in the upcoming sequel—the first scene of Red Rain, with those dreaded school buses, has remained almost exactly the same as I originally imagined it.

Tell us about your heroine: How did you chose her name? What are her interests and skills and struggles? 

My oppressive one-world government, the United, was loosely inspired by “the Beast” in the book of Revelation. Therefore, I thought it would be cool to name the major characters after the seven churches of Revelation; I used the churches’ implied strengths and sins as models for the characters’ arcs. Plus, I always thought Philadelphia was a beautiful and unique name!

[As someone who resides in Philadelphia, I'm pretty partial to the name, too. --Laurel]

Philadelphia doesn’t see herself as skillful or talented, especially when compared to her tech-genius father and brother. What she hasn’t realized yet is that she’s actually very intelligent—perhaps not with book knowledge, but with the ability to think outside the box and create solutions. She only has to realize that, just because she’s quiet, doesn’t mean she’s not brave enough to stand up to the evil that threatens her family.

What research did you do to write this book?

This is why I write soft sci-fi—so I don’t have to research! While most of the tech in the book is fictional, I did do some research on Mars and space travel. Of course the space travel in the book is extremely advanced, but I still wanted to make sure I wasn’t forcing my characters to travel faster than the speed of light!

What was the hardest part of writing this book?

Since this was my debut novel, I made it easy on myself—I kept it short and didn’t allow myself to edit for too long. The hardest part has actually been coming back to write new material for the series. Trying to work with your old writing is difficult. You want to improve on your writing, but you need to preserve series integrity and don’t want to ruin everything your readers loved about the original story. But it’s worth it!

What did you enjoy most about writing this book?

I’ve always had a special place in my heart for writing Ephesus and Standyard, so all of their scenes were fun. I’m thrilled that all my readers adore Ephesus as much as I do. (They don’t love Standyard yet... but they will... in a few more books.)

What question do you wish that someone would ask about your book, but nobody has? Share it and your answer.

I feel like I’m “incepting” myself by answering this, but here goes. I wish someone would ask me what I’d do differently if I were to rewrite Red Rain today, now that I’m older and stupider. I can see, looking back, some of the juvenile and misguided theology that worked itself into the book. The United is also single-sided in its evilness. But then, when you’re a teenager, evil is still fairly black and white in your mind. So perhaps that isn’t such a bad thing after all.

How do you find or make time to write?

I do that?

What advice would you give to someone starting out in your genre?

You don’t have to be technologically-minded to write science fiction. Not all sci-fi focuses on the tech, and even if there’s tech in your book, your character doesn’t have to dissect how it works. It’s perfectly acceptable to write “softer” sci-fi and just revel in the fanciful settings and beautiful imagery that’s possible in the fictional future!

 About Red Rain

17-year-old Philadelphia has been imprisoned most of her life because of her Christian beliefs. When her father is sent to Mars against his will to work on a mysterious science project and a benevolent official allows her to accompany him, Philadelphia knows she must keep her head down or be sent back to prison on Earth. But when she stumbles into the wrong hallway and accidentally learns too much, Philadelphia is faced with a question she doesn’t want to answer: the choice between returning to Earth—or destroying it.

About the Author

Aubrey Hansen is a pink-haired, caffeine-fueled twenty-something. She's a writer (obviously), barista, dog trainer, and the co-founder of Penoaks Publishing. She shares her house in Kansas City with three cats, a pit bull, a snake, a ferret, and a husband.

Free Offer

Aubrey is such a generous gal. She's not only offering Red Rain for free this week, but if you sign up for her newsletter, you can also get the prequel short story for free! What are you waiting for?

What Reviewers are Saying

“I was hooked from the first few sentences. In fact, I stayed up late when I got home (even though I had to get up early the next morning) to finish the book.”-Amazon Reviewer

“With solid craft and poignant world building, Aubrey Hansen has outlined a future both horrifying and realistic. I appreciated Hansen's character building skills.”-Amazon Reviewer

“I loved this book! I didn't realize it was a short novella, and I wished it would have been longer.”-Goodreads Reviewer

“The story was fascinating. I wasn't really sure what to expect, but everything came together in the end and it made sense.”-Goodreads Reviewer

Giveaway

Aubrey is offering three paperback copies of her book, Red Rain. This book will have the new cover on it. And the grand prize offering will also have the paperback of Faith Blum's book, Heaven's Jubilee, a Christian futuristic collection of short stories. To enter the giveaway, please fill out this Google form (you do not need a Google account to enter). The only required entries are your name and email address, but the more you do, the more chances you have to win.

Excerpt

 

June 2

Bookish Orchestrations-Tour Introduction and Excerpt

Laurel’s Leaves-Author Interview

Frances Hoelsema-Excerpt

Aubrey Hansen, Author and Screenwriter-Excerpt

Perpetual Gardener, Writer, and Mormon-Book Spotlight

The Overactive imagination-Book Spotlight

June 3

J. Grace Pennington-Excerpt

Gabriellyn-Excerpt and Author Interview

Joyful Peacock-Author Interview

June 4

Letters from Annie Douglass Lima-Excerpt

Another OtherWorld-Character Interview with Philadelphia

Jaye L. Knight-Excerpt

June 5

Mary’s Writing World-Book Spotlight

God’s Peculiar Treasure Rae-Book Spotlight

Rachel Rossano’s Words-Excerpt and Author Interview

June 6

Tale Weaver-Author Interview

Lisa Swinton Queen of Random-Book Spotlight

Irly Scribblings of David J Hartung-Excerpt

June 7

BookishOrchestrations-Tour Wrap-up and Giveaway Announcement


What genres are you afraid to try? Any questions for Aubrey?

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