Character Creation by Tal Lingenua (best historical fiction books of all time .TXT) 📕

an upper limit though.) But for every goal give them a good motivation to go with it so that readers will care if they achieve this goal or not.

A few tips on goals.

Keep at least a portion of them relevant to the main plot. Otherwise, your character wouldn't realistic care about what happened in the main plot.

Make the goals conflict (I'll discuss conflict in a second)

Make the goals hard. If it's too easy nobody will care.


Internal and external conflict. Novels are about characters in conflict so you must have conflict! Both internal and external.

Internal conflict is an inner struggle against yourself. Your own values and your own goals. Internal conflict gets in the way of accomplishing goals and makes the character seem human. Most people do not just make a decision and know it's right, sometimes they'll be unsure of themselves.

External conflict are other character that disagree with your character's views and goal. Nobody agrees one hundred percent of the time, and even if they do they might not agree on the right course of action.

Tips on conflict.

Create characters with opposite personalities.

What do you want your character to do? Think of reasons why'd she'd object to it. Such as moral problems she'd may encounter along the way.

Do not make one person out to be right. Things are not black and white. Make sure both sides have legitimate arguments. This will also make the problem harder to solve.

Part V

Backstory and oldstory.

What are they and what is the difference? Backstory is the character's past while oldstory is the point of time right before the story really starts. It's the story the character thinks the story is about.

A character is not just twiddling her thumbs waiting for something big and important to happen (i.e. the plot of your story). Imagine that aliens landed in your backyard right now. What were you doing before that? Certainly not waiting for them that's for sure (unless you were then...)

So ask yourself, what is your character doing before the real story starts and how is this relevant to the plot?

This is a fairly new concept that I just learned awhile ago so I don't have much practice with it. Just thought I'd share it with you.

So now I will move onto backstory. Every character has a past, even minor ones. But minor characters should not have an elaborate past, it's just not necessary and you'll most likely be wasting your time. If you DO give a minor character an elaborate past you'll probably wind up promoting her to a major character.

A Backstory can be used for numerous things: to add depth to characters, to explain behaviors, to equip characters to handle things, to increase the stakes a character has in the main plot and much more.

Here are a few tips on making backstory:

A backstory is the story of your characters life, not something to prepare them for the events of the story... unless it actually is (I mean this seriously this time) such as if your character is a princess and is heir to the throne and has been training for the day she took the crown.

A backstory is not an excuse to develop awesome (and convenient!) skills. This does not mean characters can't have awesome skills, just make sure it makes sense.

Make your character's backstory realistic.

Keep in mind how old your character is. If she's only 7, I doubt she's seen every country in the world in person.

Your backstory can be as long and as intricate as you want to make it. Just remember that it's only backstory and the reader will not learn it all. But it's still important that you know it all.

Part VI

Probably the hardest characters to create are villains.

They are set up to fail. 99.99% of villains lose to the heroes despite the fact that they are usually bigger, badder and more experienced. There's no reason the villains should be losing this much except for the fact that their the villains (which is a terrible reason mind you.)

How do we fix this? Let the villain when battles (major and important ones too. Especially actually.) Let them kill a lot of important people (not just footsolider number #27.) but still let them lose the war. It's a start I guess.

Anyway, enough about villains' winning percentages.

How do we make villains? To start, villains, and everybody for that matter, rarely think they're evil. What ever your villain is doing she has to think that she's a good person or at least not pure evil.

If your villain is someone trying to mow down trees to build a mall she is not evil, she's just industrious. If she is trying to invade the earth because her planet is dying she is not evil either, she's just trying to save her species.

Villains, like every other character, think the story is about her and should act as such. The 'heroes' of the story are the villains of hers and she's trying to defeat them and should put her best foot forward in doing so. She shouldn't ever hold back because she's supposed to lose. That isn't fair to her, the heroes (false sense of accomplish) or your readers.

So here are some tips on making villains.

Just shoot the hero! Nobody likes death trap machines and villains who talk for twenty minutes before the hero escapes or gets rescued. I highly recommend that you never back your hero into a corner that requires the villain to total fail or act completely incompetent for the hero to escape in the first place.

The better the villain, the better the plan. Don't make the villain a super genius who makes the stupidest plans just so the hero can win.

Also, the better the villain is the more often they'll succeed. It's just a fact of life.

Villains are humans too! (unless they're not...) remember they have feelings and families and are not just evil entities (unless they are...)

Incompetence is a no-no. I'm not going to say you shouldn't ever

have incompetent villains and henchmen but it really is out of hand if nobody has any brains on the other side.

Killing no-names doesn't count for anything. The villain can cause mass destruction and megadeaths but if she never kills anybody that we the reader cares about she's not really doing anything evil. (killing loved ones that the hero cares about counts too.)

Part VII

What is your character good at? Is she an excellent spell caster, a chess grandmaster, is she the star center of the basketball team? All characters have to be good at something, right?

But don't just go around assigning random skills to people. Let your character pick. I mean, why would your character be an expert mountain climber if she was afraid of heights? Think about your character's personality, think about the sorts of things that she would like to do and would excel at.

You can fill out as many skills that your character has as you want, but remember these two thing: number 1, just because she has a skill doesn't mean she'll get to use it.

You can do one of two things (or something else you can think of). Mention it so it doesn't seem like all the skills your character has are useful. Or remove it, so you don't have information irrelevant to the story.

And number 2, keep it realistic. Nobody in the entire universe is good at everything. Nobody is capable of doing a little bit of everything. Your character may be a talented athlete or a child prodigy but somewhere doing her life she'll have to develop these skills.

Not only are characters who can do everything unrealistic readers will despise them. (You don't want your readers to hate your characters do you? Well, it's unavoidable someone somewhere will hate your characters guts. just don't let it be for this reason!)

So here are a few tips on skills.

How old is your character? Think about the things that someone her age would do and be good at.

Do not center useful skills onto one character. (see above)

Remember, most of us are not the Michael Jordan of our trade. Somebody has to be average or even bad at stuff. Nobody would care about MJ if everybody

could play as well as him.

Don't make useless characters. I mean, you can

. But if there's somebody who can't do anything at all people will just think she's pathetic.

Part VIII