Know your Characters

This is a post for your characters, getting to know those delightful people in your head so we can get to know them in your book. In no particular order, here are many methods I have used in the past for my own stories to be used or ignored by you.
- 100 Things. This was suggested for me by someone else actually. It's simple enough, make a list of things about your character to get to know them. Not all of it may be important to your story, but even if you never mention that Paulina likes pretzels but not cotton candy in your story you will know that about them and it is one step closer to knowing your character.
- General Information: because we do not get the know people by lists alone. Start simple and stay simple. Write you characters name, height, weight, appearance and interesting physical attributes. Go on with this list until you have the bascis: where do they live, did they have a good childhood, did they get along with thier parents, what was thier firt memory, etc.
- Plotting your character : where they go in the story. Write a one sentence summary of this characters role in the story. Follow it up with his or her motivation, thier abstract want, and goal, concrete want. Add a conflict, why they can't have their goal, and then an epiphany: what they learned in the story and how they changed. The epiphany is how they do or do not overcome the conflict to get to thier goal. Expand the one stence into a paragraph.
- One Page: then, write one page of your characters story. This should help with plot as well as character.
- Charcter Charts: once you have a basic description it is a good idea to expand those ideas into character charts. These should include: how they change by the end and general info as well as the character arch. Character arch should have: initial condition (state of the character at the begining), inciting incident (what moves the characters life in a different direction), escalation (the long series of events leading up to the end), momnt of truth (when they are forced to make a decision that will change them) and final state (character at the end of the story).
My final advice for character is this: make them feel strongly about something. A character that is passive usually can't keep up interested through an entire book let alone series, yet we see these kinds of characters so much in books today. Give your character strong opinions, they don't have to have a strong opinion about every little thing (though I do love those kind of characters) just make them care about something.
Happy writing.