Just a little list of questions you might like to keep in mind when creating new characters, in no specific order. These aren’t the things you need to fill in the answers for, or even necessarily provide the answers for within the story: but knowing these answers will leak into your writing and make the characters stronger.
I’m adding to these periodically when something new dawns on me, so the list might grow over time.
Goals and desires
What do they need?
What do they want?
What do they fear?
What motivates them?
What would make them happy/content?
How do their goals change over the course of the story?
Agency
What are they willing to sacrifice everything for?
What is the one thing that makes them from random bystanders into the main characters?
How far are they willing to go what are they likely to do, to achieve those needs/desires/goals? What actual actions do they take when something threatens what matters to them, or stands in the way of them and their goals?
There’s also a nice exercise here: try writing down what you know of your story as a list, using [character]+[active verb] (ie “Reiner executes magical heretics”, “Fin shadows the prince and hides in his luggage to get from point A to point B”, etc. Be specific: “learns”, “discovers”, “must”, and such words don’t count as specific active verbs in this case)
The fun stuff
What must their sacrifice in order to reach their goals?
What’s the worst thing that can happen to them
At the beginning of the story?
At a mid-point/turning point?
At/near the end of the story?
And/Or, why is the inciting incident (the event that kickstarts the story) the worst thing that happens to them at the time?
What is completely out of their control?
What kinds of mistakes are they likely to make?
What kinds of failures are they likely to face?
What are their weaknesses?
What do they regret?
What makes them cry?
What is it that they definitely don’t want to do?
What is the one thing that would break them?
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