Recently I had a conversation with one of my friends about our shelved drafts and past WIPs, and she admitted that she has a really hard time writing anything but fanfiction. She seems to have a good handle on world-building and plot, but she has difficulty creating her own characters, and I know for a fact that she's not the only one.
Now everyone creates characters differently; everyone has their own process, their own methods for getting under those characters' skins, and character building can be difficult, especially if you're new to writing, or if you've been in the fanfiction trenches for a long time.
Bu never fear! TheSpiderWriter is here to help!
Ultimately, only you can do you, but here are a few methods that I use to get my characters breathing.
1. Borrow Someone Else's
A) The Technique
Notice I said borrow. Borrow, not steal. What's the difference?
The difference is, stealing someone's character is stealing someone's character--you take a vivacious figure, like, Megamind from Megamind, as a random, nonspecific example, and you plop them in your story, change a few details--maybe he's a human instead of an alien! But he's still got a big head, and mispronounces lots of words, and his parents died saving his life, and he has a crush on that reporter girl, and....yeah. That's stealing. You stole Megamind and gave him a different name and some cosmetic surgery; he's still not yours.
Borrowing is more like taking someone else's character and tracing the outline, then filling it in with different stuff. You're not trying to put Megamind in your story, just pieces of him--his childish naiveté, perhaps, with a smidgen of angst and a dollop of arrogance. Then you take these broad strokes and refine them, using the characters around them and the history you make for them to make them new and different and completely your own--Megamind, evil mastermind alien supervillain-turned-hero becomes, I don't know, *vague hand gesture indicating the application of the Fuck It Adjustment* Don Cheezley, a sensitive high schooler hiding the pain of being orphaned beneath a front of arrogance, who, until his parents' death, was homeschooled, and kept largely away from the rest of the world because of his parents' religious beliefs.
Now that he's in a foster home, and public school, his inner world is dark, labyrinthine, and tumultuous, but the outer world is bright and new and strange. As he explores the outside world for the first time, he makes friends, enemies, tries his best to survive high school, and makes a few new friends who are out of place in the grand scheme of things, but have a handle on this whole "irl" thing. With their help he starts learning how to blend in, but also slowly comes to the realization that his parents were cultists, and while they loved him very much, the damage from the things they taught him--and the things they didn't--will be difficult to reverse.
(That character you can steal. I have no use for him. ... yet.)
B) The Work
To keep yourself from plagiarizing, and to make sure that this character is breathing (it can be hard to tell with borrowed souls), you have to work hard. Developing the backstory and making this character stand out on their own is crucial--and it's important that the characters they'll be interacting with aren't all from the same cast this one was taken from, or else you'll just end up with a bland echo chamber of someone else's work. If this is how you create all your characters, you first of all have a lot of work to do, and second of all, should be taking them from variegated sources.
You may have to do a lot of writing before you really start writing--when I started the first draft of what would come to be called Captive Stars, I borrowed a couple characters that I had trouble writing as anything but the same characters in an AU--I had to write five or six drafts of the story's start before the character's started to really live their own lives, no longer beholden to the source material from which they'd sprung. It was only once the sweet baby was snarking at the protagonist and the practical sidekick was romantisizing the world around him that I could call them real, and it was at that point that they really took on a life of their own.
Ultimately I ended up scrapping those characters completely because the story took a very different turn and they were no longer necessary (such things happen, unfortunately--you may have to do a lot of scrapping along the way to your final draft, my fine friends), but I keep them in my back pocket for a prospective future project--you never know when something you scrap could become useful in the future, after all.
My point (however much work it's taken to get to it) is that, while this is arguably the easiest route to take, there's still a lot of work you'll need to do, because these characters still need to be yours--no one else's.
2. Frankenstein It
Another method is to take pieces from multiple characters--whether they are yours or someone else's--and MacGyver them into something useful. This one is a little bit more difficult to figure out, but so long as you don't let any one character donate too many limbs, it's easier to make this creature your own--when done well, it becomes one of those perfect blends where no one reading the novel can tell where any one trait came from.
Sticking with the Don Cheezeley example, maybe you want Don's love interest/good friend to be wacky but in touch with reality, and also snarky, so you take the giggly madman do-as-you-like parts of Spongebob Squarepants, the logician parts of Spock, and the sardonic wit of Severus Snape, super glue 'em together, and grin at your monstrosity before it starts speaking in tongues and tries to devour you.
When you do this, there's a lot of sanding down that needs to happen--you can't have Snape's wit AND his moody demeanor if you're trying to make him do the Spongebob laugh, and the Spongebob's Cloudcuckoolander activities will be greatly reeled in by Spock's logical approach to life--you pick the parts you want, then the rest you discard. The holes between, or the parts where conflicting traits would ordinarily overlap? Those you have to fill in for yourself--and again, your backstory and the world around your character will play a vital role in this; no human being develops in a vacuum, and as such characters cannot be completely disconnected from the world they live in.
3. Base It Off Someone From Real Life
Basing a character off of someone you know IRL can be tricky--if you make them too similar, you risk offending the person they're built after, and a possible suit for defamation of character or whatever the kids get sued for these days. When basing a character off of someone from real life, unless the figure in question is a public one, you'll want to be subtle about it being an actual person. Keep it loose--take what you need and make up the rest, and try not to let the character resemble the person too much--and whatever you do, never, absolutely not once ever, use their real name, or anything close to it. You don't want to get into that.
Combining more than one person can help, or you could combine the person with one or more fictional characters--you could Frankenstein from a little bit of everything, if you wanted!
Again, remember your backstory and supporting cast; they. are. vital.
The first three all come down to; borrow all you like (borrowing is, ultimately, what we're doing every time we're inspired by something--there's no shame in it) but never take any too much from any one source.
Now we come to the more difficult parts--the parts where you try to conjure something out of nothing.
*Cue dramatic music*
4. From Scratch--Planned
There are a lot of ways to set about making your own completely "original" character, but it comes down to this: This is where she is, what she's doing there, where she's been, and what she looks like. These are the things she likes to do, this is what she wants, why she wants it, and these are the things in her way.
That's pretty much it. You can fill out character questionnaires to get a better idea of who your character is, or use random generators to pin it down (I recommend Springhole.net), or just jot stuff down on paper until you feel that your character is fleshed out. As long as you have the basic questions written out, you have a character, Making them breathe is a matter of finding their voice, their habits, their manner of speaking--keep a character bible, write down everything you can, search out lists online, watch people as you go about your day. Think about your character's quirks and habits, the way they walk, talk, dress--write it all down, maybe draw your character, and hope for the best.
In the end, hoping for the best is all we can do. Sometimes, a character you create will fall flat. That's okay, though! That's why we edit, after all.
5. From Scratch--Spur Of The Moment
Sometimes you just need to wing it. Start out with a name, a general purpose, a smidgen of an idea, and just go. It's the Improv Method for character creation, basically--you just need to let the information flow, and allow this character to reveal itself over time.
It seems like a nothing method, but honestly? It works. These can sometimes be your best characters; they have the most potential to surprise you, and just like with Improv (can you tell that I just got back from my Improv class?), some of the best things come from surprising yourself. Hell, a lot of my favorite characters are ones I got to know by going in blind--basically the whole cast of (my shelved WIP) Silhouette were sparse sketches that came alive when I turned them out on their journey, and when I wrote The Snake With Amber Eyes, a little girl named Shelby snuck in from the sidelines and basically stole the story.
These little guys can be a handful, and the con to this method is that it can leave you stymied in the middle of a scene because you don't have all the information you need for them, or the character can come out inconsistent or not-fully-formed, which is a valid issue. They can also take the story completely off the rails and leave you reeling, but, as always, it can--and should--be fixed in post.
6. How I Make My Characters
>Stares at screen
>Makes guttural noise
>Throws up arms
>Makes pterodactyl noise
The truth is, my methodology for creating characters is wildly inconsistent. I mix and match from the list above--for some projects, I base characters off of books and movies I've seen, for some I plan them all out beforehand and fill out a million questionnaires, sometimes I sit for hours using random generators to develop a human being, for some I slam real people onto the pages and change their names and give them super powers, and for some, I just straight up wing it.
Consistencies exist, though--I almost always draw my characters, at least the important ones, so I can get a feel for what they look like, and use their facial features and posing, etc. to reveal aspects of their personalities. I do a lot of characterizing in my head on the fly--I listen to music that reminds me of the character, connecting it to their life and choices, I fill in the blank spaces of their backstories and envision scenes with them as I go for walks or try to sleep at night.
Sometimes I tie characters into the zodiac to better pin down their personalities--this character is really emotional and all-or-nothing, so maybe he's a Scorpio, which would also indicate blah blah blah, etc. etc.
But a lot of the time, I'm making it up as I write, or else sitting up in bed at three in the morning to scribble down notes before I fall asleep and forget them.
The Coates Curriculum for Creating Characters essentially comes down to this:
1. Make them breathe.
2. Keep thinking about them.
It doesn't matter, ultimately, how it's done, as long as it works for you and produces a character that seems like more than just a puppet on a string or a thinly veiled clone of someone else. Just keep working at them, pushing them, trying to figure out their insides, and once you think you have it down pat, let them surprise you--even if you've planned everything out perfectly beforehand, if they ask you to deviate from the path, let them do so--you can always scrap it later.
But you might be pleasantly surprised at how well the character knows themselves--which is to say, probably better than you do.
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