I’ve been working on and writing on an interesting story and world for a client the last couple of months, I have a wide range of creative freedom on this which is always nice. But with any new story and world there is something that is always required to really paint the scenes and events that take place. Without characters the writing becomes little more than a travel brochure. Creating characters for any story is a process of several levels; it’s not just a matter of giving a name or coming up with a witty description of some voluptuous creature. Major and minor roles need thought, preparation and above all some kind of passion investing.

You don’t have to like all your characters but I find you do have to have some kind of emotional response to them. Some of the best writing I’ve ever done was for a character I absolutely loathed. He was sadistic, evil, and generally a complete jack ass and I thrilled at writing for someone completely unlike myself. Exploration of personality is one of the more fascinating aspects of character creation.

These ties in to writing but also video game development, your characters that carry the narrative should be thought out, not card board cut outs that present little more than vehicles for imparting information. This is something of course that fails more often than not in many games. Even the most well constructed game can have some of the most boring and dull characters ever thought of. I suspect this is due to the general ambivalence that seems to go with story development in games. I could continue to rant on this for a long, long, long time but I won’t, at least for today.

If your characters aren’t interesting to you, if you just don’t have any emotional investment in them, then how can you expect other people to? I have had troubles many times in the past where a particular character just wasn’t doing it for me, and I’ve halted in writing of the overall project just to fix that kind of problem. Dead end, boring characters irritate the hell out of me and if I can’t find that spark it can kill the flow. Yes of course I could continue on with another scene, but always in the back of my mind I’ll have that part I’m skipping nagging at me. Character development is one part planning and one part spontaneous genesis. I could be trucking along writing with gusto and suddenly when it’s time to introduce someone new I could inject a character I planned for, or the muses will suddenly jump on me with both feet and give life to a new incarnation of unexpected import.

This current project is no exception, I was given some basic character data to play with, but in the course of writing I created a whole new vector of story arc, characters I’ve absolutely fell in love with and the dimensions of the story have grown exponentially with their conception. The balance of power in any story comes from plot, environment, and characters. You can have a fantastic plot and terrible characters, or vice versa. It’s finding that balance, and when you’re stuck look to your characters to tell you where you should be going.

Like many of my scribing brethren, our characters are drawn from people we know, or in many cases are pieces of ourselves, drawn from those aspects of our personality that are a parts of the pattern, emotions and thoughts we might not explore in day to day life can come out in our characters and we feel more emotional attachment to them than we anticipated.

The bottom line of course is that every good story has equally good and captivating characters, find those pieces of yourself that you might want to hide and explore them, look to the world around and find interesting personalities that might inspire you to further create your cast. With rich characters the story will build beyond your expectations, never skimp, even if you have to break off the pieces of your soul and roll them out on the cookie sheet. You might just blow your own mind with what you can bake up with the right ingredients!