|
Surfing My Site
Main Page
The Not-So Famous DILBART
|
A Matter of UnderstandingSubmitted 01/13/01
When designing your stories, keep in the forefront of your mind that the goal of this type of writing is to create a reasonably realistic scenario. Most writers do a very good job of manufacturing other worlds, complete with gadgets, props, vehicles, and other such background materials. The real trouble comes when a writer tries to populate his creation. Literary representations of human beings are called characters.
A character is the creature that emerges from the text.
For maximum effect on the reader, the character should appear as real as possible.
He must be free of unreal or unbelievable absolutes.
No one is absolutely evil, or absolutely good. - SquidoQ
|
Such an absolute is not a character, it is a characteristic.
Evil, loud, cranky, these are characteristics, they make up a fraction of your character, they do not comprise his total.
Many intertwined characteristics create believable characters because they reflect reality, in which humans are each unique combination of characteristics.
Remember that an effective character is a person, not a personality. If simply the embodiment of a single personality, the character is flat, two-dimensional.
A sufficiently complex character will be able to attain all three dimensions that human beings are capable of.