Sue Viders - Ten Steps to Creating Memorable Characters: Forms, Checklists & Exercises

Great stories, books, plays, and movies need memorable characters as well as an interesting plot. This book, however, focuses only on how to write really great characters people who come alive in the mind of the reader.

Before we begin our in-depth character analysis, we need to first discuss several writing elements that must be considered by any writer, new or published. These elements apply to screenwriters as well.

• Is your book or movie more character or more plot-driven?

• What is the genre of your book or movie?

• What about names for your characters?

• Whose point of view guides the story?

Whether you are a dedicated writer of copious outlines or whether you write each page by the seat of your pants without knowing what is coming next, these four questions remain important and somehow must be answered either before you sit down to write or soon after.

This book is aimed at helping those authors or screenwriters who want to publish commercial fiction or to see their work up on the silver screen. These are stories targeted to people who wish to read for entertainment. They want to forget the troubles of their everyday world and become absorbed in the story and the characters problems. Or they wish to go to a movie and be swept away from their everyday life into a land of excitement and enchantment.

To that end, we have devised a new way to build your character. It is a combination of explanations and definitions of what goes into building a character, together with checklists and exercises which will allow your characters to become real, breathing people.

We will also introduce you to the Character Diamond or the four Cs, which is another way to look at character building. We have also created three characters to follow throughout the book so you can see how we have used the various steps to build these characters. Lets begin.

Building a memorable character is an ongoing PROCESS. You will discover, as you go through this book, with each new element you add to your character, s/he becomes more real, more three-dimensional, and more memorable.

The CHARACTER or the PLOT?

The answer is it really doesnt matter. Some writers develop characters that make the plot, while others take a plot idea and then build the characters. What matters is that the two must work together to yield a good book or movie.

No matter how great the plot, it is the characters who make the story memorable. Even a unique and original premise soon grows boring if readers or viewers dont care about the characters. On the other hand, wonderful characters can become static if they dont face some sort of interesting journey or exciting conflict to let them develop into everything they can be. In this way, plot and characters intertwine until you couldnt have one without the other.

When the plot comes first:

• The idea of the story forms from an article about a murder case, or an incident from real life. Things like a divorce or death may force the main character to cope. Here the plot is determined by what type of character is needed to fit the action of the story.