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.