How to "find" a new character

Creating new characters is an arduous, scary process. It involves describing them, working out their social standing, developing their psyche and creating a background for them - not to mention the elusive name.

Now try this.


Take an empty chair and set it down in the middle of your room. Grap a pen, paper, tablet, phone, computer, Dictaphone - anything, and prepare to write. Imagine a person sitting in front of you in the chair. He or she fits perfectly into your novel, maybe they are the protagonist, maybe the evil overlord, how about a minor character? Someone who flits in and out of the protagonist's vision. This person sitting in front of you is the perfect person for the role you need to fill to progress your book and make it perfect.

How is the person sitting? Perched on the edge of the chair, ready for sudden danger? Asleep after the hard journey they have been on? Maybe lounging on your chair staring straight at you as if to say, "I own this chair. This chair is my chair now."

What does the person look like? Male? Female? Alien? Does the person look as if they look after themselves? Long hair? Short hair? No hair? Four hairs? Does the person have a bag or a purse? What's in the bag? What's in their pockets? Do they have pockets?

Set yourself a time limit for these questions. Grab your phone right now and set the timer to 5 minutes. It's all you'll need, trust me.

When your time is up and you have finished writing, look back at what you have written. Now answer yourself this: who the heck is this guy? Where have they come from? Why are they wearing muddy clothes? What's so special about them? The storyline of your character (and maybe your whole novel) will develop from answering these questions.

Just remember, the character doesn't come from the name, the name comes from the character.


This technique was inspired by lngwstksgk's helpful post on /r/shutupandwrite. Check it out.

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Ideas, Sandwiches and Alliteration

I have an idea floating around inside of my noggin for a story, but I can't quite figure out any sort of plot. In my head there are characters, places and events happening, yet there is absolutely no metaphorical glue to stick it all together; no rope to tie the points into cohesion.

The idea came to me when I was sitting at the bus station with my girlfriend in Canterbury town centre. For some reason there were a lot of feathers floating around and we were talking about where they could have came from, when all of a sudden she snaps one out of the air with a deft movement of  her hand. She holds it up to me so I can see it and I see that it is a very small fluffy feather, the type that young birds get before they achieve their fully fledged flight feathers (try saying that 400 times in a row). After looking at it, Laura drops the feather and I watch it flutter down to the ground, but falling into the deep pitch black of a drain. All of a sudden my mind is racing and I have amazing ideas for civilisations living underground and serial killers and a protagonist, but I just don't have a plot to hold it all together.

I have the bread.
I have the butter.
I have the salad.
I don't have the *insert preferred sandwich filling here* to go in my tasty lunchtime morsel.

So where do I go from here? I guess I am going to have to start saying yes to a lot of new ideas when trying to work out my story. I feel like the more that I try out new ideas in the process of trying to get at least 1 chapter down on paper, the easier it is going to be. Perhaps I will be worrying more about thinking of ways to incorporate new techniques and the story will just flow out naturally. In any case, I have a lot of thinking to do before I get started.

How do you get ideas for stories? Comments always appreciated.

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