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While exotic landscapes are part and parcel of fantasy worlds, one thing that truly makes stories set in such places outstanding is a stellar cast of characters. As an aspiring fantasy worlds builder, creating characters who are hard to forget for your audience ought to be one of your top priorities as you start working on the plot. You want your viewers to get invested in them and talk about them long after they’ve reached the end of the story.
There are many ways to go about creating characters that truly stand out. One surefire method is to look to your favorite stories for inspiration. See how their creators developed them, fleshed them out, and made them change throughout the plot. Seeing how other people did this can help you, especially if you’re having a tough time working on one or more characters.
Part of the process of creating characters entails giving them personalities that separate them from everyone else. It could be as simple as a nervous tic, a peculiar way of speaking, or how he carries himself. These elements essentially become part of a character’s signature personality or at least illuminate certain aspects that might prove salient down the road.
Before you start working on the story proper, it is imperative that you flesh out the characters you intend to put in it. Doing this means you know where they’ll end up, how they get there from the first time you introduce them to your audience, and so on. You’ll know when they’ll undergo changes that impact their psyche and how they perceive the other characters and the world itself.
This is article number thirty-three in The Sunlit Hearth series. If you’d like to see what else we have to offer, our blog page is where you ought to go since it’s full of many stellar articles that cover many aspects of constructing a fantasy world from scratch! It shouldn’t take too long before you comes across one or more articles that catch your eye!
While people associate the fantasy genre with wondrous landscapes that are mesmerizing to the eye, they also think of an amazing cast of characters who are hard to forget. Take The Lord of the Rings for example. Whenever you think of the series, you think of great characters like Aragorn, Gandalf, Legolas, and so on. Having amazing characters can turn a great story into a truly outstanding one.
When it comes to creating characters who your audience thinks about long after they’ve finished the story, you have many options at your disposal. If you want to learn how to build them from scratch, we have a fantastic article that covers that so check it out!
One of the best ways to make memorable characters is to look to your favorite ones for inspiration. Why do you like them and what makes them interesting to you? Is it how they act towards others, their magical powers, or lack of, or their fashion style? You can use them as a template on which to construct characters who fit in your world and maybe they’ll wind up becoming fan favorites.
Part of creating characters who stand out is giving them great material to work with. That is, they’re involved in plot-lines that naturally fit them but also impact the world in a meaningful way. For example, suppose you have a cranky wizard who must leave his home to investigate the strange events that have been popping up late. He could grouse about how he misses the comfort of home but at the same time, he recognizes that only he can piece together what’s going on since he noticed these unusual events.
Another great method to use in creating characters is to introduce events that test their mettle when fortune turns against them in the plot. How they handle these setbacks reveal a lot about who they are at heart which makes them even more interesting to your audience. People love a good comeback story when one or more characters have lost everything and they must work harder than ever to get everything back and emerge in a stronger position than they were beforehand.
Another essential ingredient in creating characters that your audience wants to spend more time with is to give them interesting personalities. That is, they should feel like real people with their own goals, dreams, and strategies on how to attain them. Believe it or not, their personalities influence essentially everything, from how they interact with other characters to their outlook of the world.
Personalities come in many hues and colors. Some are as simple as their mannerisms or way of speaking. Generally speaking, the more sophisticated they speak and the more extensive vocabulary they have, the more likely they are to be well educated or wealthy or both. The opposite holds true, meaning they’re more likely to be uneducated, poor or in poverty, or both. Their education level is reflected in how fluently they converse or use broken language.
Another part of constructing personalities when creating characters is giving them idiosyncrasies. Believe it or not, this is one of the most vital in that each character is unique in the ones they have. For instance, one character could nervously clean his glasses or another could fidget with either his jacket or hands. Their idiosyncrasies reveal a lot about who they are at heart.
A factor that influences the personalities of characters is their fashion style. Many people look at what type of clothes other people wear, how they’re arranged, the accessories they have on, and so on to figure out who they are in terms of personality and go on from there. A rich person might have extravagant or luxurious clothes whereas a poor one might have hand-me-downs or have visible tears in his clothes. The kind of clothes they like and dislike can shine a light on aspects of their personalities.
The last element of creating characters and their personalities is how they carry themselves. Are they confident, sulky, optimistic, or pessimistic? How they carry themselves is a reflection of their normal demeanor. A confident person might walk with a jaunty bounce or be a tad too bold in the things he says as opposed to a morose person who might move lethargically and be hostile to other people.
A lot of work goes into creating characters that people can’t get enough of but one of the most salient steps in making it happen occurs long before the first page of the story is written. As a fantasy creator, it is incumbent upon you to have at least a good idea of where you want each of the major characters in your story to end up and how they’ll get there from the first time they appear in the plot.
To ensure this, fleshing them out is key to success. This takes place during both the brainstorming and outlining phases as you’re jotting down different ideas for both the characters and the story itself. You have to really dive into the journey of each major character and break down each key step in their development, many of which will occur at certain points in the main plot.
Even if you’ve come up with a character you think your audience will like, all that hard work will go to waste if his initial appearance doesn’t land with your viewers. You only have one shot to have a character make a great first impression so make it count. Have the first scene he shows up in showcase an element of his personality that piques their curiosity. This scene is meant to be an appetizer, something that spurs them to want to learn more about him.
As the story progresses along, characters should change alongside it. At key points in the plot, a character will undergo a development of some sort. It could be minor or major but the key is said development will spearhead a change in the affected character. When a character begins to change, that change should be organic and not for the sake of the plot. It should also feel both natural to the character himself and your audience. You want them to feel like what’s happening makes sense and you definitely don’t want them to think otherwise, lest it harm the overall story.
Creating characters might seem simple but it is anything but simple. To truly create outstanding characters, there are a number of things you must to in order to make it happen. Only through hard work and building them from the ground up will you have characters who could very well become fan favorites and make them want to spend even more time with them!
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