# 1.5 Tips on character creation

- Use a journal to build ideas for character.
- Consider all the influences that go into the making of your character: age, gender, race, nationality, marital status, religion, profession.
- Know about your character’s inner life: what s/he wants, thinks, remembers, resents, fears, dreams, denies.
- Know about your character’s behaviour, what s/he wears, buys, eats, says, works at and plays at.
- Know how your character speaks and how this changes according to context, mood and intention.
- See and describe your character vividly, how s/he looks, how s/he moves, his or her possessions and surroundings.
- Focus on your character’s contradictions and conflicts in order to create a complex person and also to generate plot.
- Remember the four main methods of character presentation: summary, appearance, habit and scene.

OpenLearn - Start writing fiction
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