Creating Characters in Creative Writing
If you are interested in creative writing and looking into improving your abilities to write stories, then character work is one of the most important areas for you to improve. In a very good story, the action and the events will be driven by the characters and they will feel real and react in the ways that real characters react. If your characters fall flat on the other hand though, suddenly your stories won’t be engaging or interesting and people won’t care what happens to them – which removes a big plot from the story.
Making and writing characters is also incredibly fun and one of the best things you’ll learn during creative writing scholarships. When you first start to learn to create characters in creative writing scholarships, you will find just how immersed you become in their lives and backstory, and how real they start to feel. Suddenly you are a puppet master able to control the lives and fates of your characters, though at the same time if you write your characters well then you will find that they even start to write the events themselves as you realize what they would do in that situation. At this point the writing is out of your hands and you are more of a conduit for the characters to the paper which is an incredible feeling. The characters will live with you for that time, and they will seem truly real – everyone knows how J.K. Rowling reportedly cried after killing off characters in the last Harry Potter and as a writer this makes complete sense.
So in order to get to this point where you write believable and interesting characters you will benefit greatly from attending creative writing scholarships. But what can we learn right away?
Well for one thing you need to think about how to initially create the characters. To do this you should write a profile for each character and come up with a back story, a career, a list of hobbies and interests and anything else you can to ‘flesh them out’. The more you write down, the more real the characters will seem. Even if you never reveal some of these details in the story, just by knowing them you can make your character act in a consistent way that is like a real person.
Making your character’s personality is also important. What is this character like? You will learn on creative writing scholarships that everything you write comes from you, and this means that all characters you create have elements of yourself in them, but you will also draw from people you know and even characters from other fiction in order to create an amalgamated personality. Imagine the way they talk and the way they act in your mind and this will help you to fill out more of the details.
Crucially when you write these characters let them act and speak as they would in real life using the materials you’ve created. This means that you won’t reveal all their details but rather they will only be revealed when it’s relevant. Avoid exposition which is completely forced dialogue and instead let them speak and react as they should. Likewise don’t make them serve the plot, make the plot serve the characters so that they are allowed to breathe and grow on the page.
When you attend creative writing scholarships you will learn a lot about creating characters which is highly fascinating. Follow the links to find a creative writing scholarship.
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