It doesn't hurt to do this, but i recommend that you do it later rather than sooner -perhaps at about the same time that you name your character. Nervous whistling, jangling car keys kept in the right front pocket, a complete wardrobe of blue shirts, the anxious stroking of a rabbit's foot in moments of deep stress. I've read a number of otherwise-decent writing books that have you start out creating your character by giving him a hook - some little device that characterizes the person.

But overall, the most satisfying stories will at least approach this rule. This isn't a hard-and-fast rule, and for every book where the writer followed it, you'll find at least one where the writer ignored it completely. If you want to really make your character come to life, choose something that terrifies you - you'll find that when you write something that makes you shake, you'll make your reader shake, too.ДЄ rule of good storytelling is that the protagonist will confront the thing he fears the most and overcome it in order to win the thing he desires the most. What scares him to death? Humiliation, disfigurement, pain, terminal illness, poverty? What will he do anything to avoid? What has he already done to avoid his greatest fears? Give him something that will wake him up in a cold sweat in the middle of the night, hands clutching his covers, body rigid with terror. He also wants to avoid something - and these things the character wants to avoid can be more compelling by far that the things he hopes to gain. If he's like most people, he wants several somethings, and about the time you allow yourself to start discovering them, you'll begin to find out where your story is going, and what it will be about. In writing as in life, nothing you do is ever wasted. Or you can, when you create the character, bank him for a later book if he doesn't fit your needs once you get rolling. It won't be written in stone and you can always go back later and change it. What does the character want? Love, respect, courage, revenge, a kidney for his kid sister, to find the son she gave up for adoption when she was sixteen? Throw something down on the paper. Say 'My main character wants_more than anything else in the world.' When she gets into trouble, you're going to fall back on that hair-flipping thing, and she's going to do it so often she'll be bald by the end of the book.Дo start developing your character by giving him a problem, a dramatic need, a compulsion.Д®ven if you don't have the foggiest idea what your story is going to be about yet, you don't know where it's going to take place, and you haven't found anything compelling that you'd like to say to an audience of more than one, you can do this. Second, if you have a name and a physical description right away - Jane Meslie, 37, blonde with bright blue eyes and great legs and a habit of flipping her hair out of her face when she's frustrated - you're going to be tempted to look no deeper that her appearance. so you might be carrying a grudge against redheads or good-looking men, and you might have a tendency to make every redhead in your books a bitch, or every hunk a creep in disguise. In the same way, maybe your heart has been broken twice by redheads, or the gorgeous surfer you dated briefly stole your credit card, did drugs in the back seat of your car and got your twin sister pregnant before dumping you and vanishing from your life forever. And that influence won't necessarily be a benefit to your story. so when you decide to name your protagonist charlie before you really get to meet him, he is automatically going to carry along a lot of baggage that you probably aren't even going to be aware of - but that baggage will subtly influence the direction of your story, and perhaps its outcome. Perhaps every charlie you ever knew was a great guy, while every Barry you knew was an idiot. The first is that you have a lot of preconceived ideas about names and body types. Why wouldn't you give your character a name and blue eyes before you find out anything else about him? I know this doesn't seem logical at first glance - after all, you name a baby before you get to know him very well. Don't start your character off with a name or a physical description.

Dos 2 character creation