How to Master Character Creation in 7 Simple Steps
Characters are the engine of every story.
Quite often, indeed, they live longer than the story itself. How many of you happened to remember perfectly the characters of a novel read many years ago and not remember the plot at all?
Plot is no more than footprints left in the snow after your characters have run by on their way to incredible destinations.
Ray Bradbury, Zen in the Art of Writing
For this reason, it is very important to understand how to master character creation: here’s how to do it in 7 easy steps.
Step 1: download bibisco, your character creation program
Since the creation of the characters is essential, it’s necessary to have the right program that will help you in this task.
bibisco is a novel writing software focused on character creation.
Our vision is that characters are the driving force of any novel. So bibisco is packed with tools designed specifically for character creation.
bibisco is a desktop application for Linux, Mac, Windows. It’s available in 14 languages: Czech, Dutch, French, German, English, Italian, Polish, Portuguese (for both Brazil and Portugal), Russian, Serbian, Slovenian, Spanish, Turkish.
You can download bibisco from the official website: https://bibisco.com.
Step 2: create your project
Once bibisco is installed, it’s time to create your project.
Choose the title (you can always change it later), register yourself as the author, select the language and you are ready to go!
Step 3: create your first character
It’s time to create your first character!
bibisco divides the characters into two groups: the main characters and the secondary characters.
Each main character has a conflict, the driving force of the story. Secondary characters instead don’t have a conflict, but they are useful for the development of the story.
In this tutorial we focus on the creation of the main characters: let’s create the first one by assigning it a name.
Step 4: get to know the character in depth
This is certainly the most important step.
All the great characters in the stories have one thing in common: they are believable.
Characters who are either completely good or completely bad are stereotypes and therefore not believable.
What makes a positive character interesting and believable is discovering their dark side. What makes us empathetic with an evil character is knowing that before they became who they is, they was a sweet and generous person.
So, how then can we create interesting characters? Knowing them thoroughly, so that it emerges their human nature, with strengths, weaknesses, contradictions.
bibisco offers an innovative, simple and fun way to get to know the characters: by interviewing them!
Through 138 questions divided into 6 sections (personal data, physical features, behaviors and attitudes, psychology, ideas and passions, sociology) we can know everything about our characters.
It’s also possible to enrich the knowledge of a character by associating images with it. One of the images can be selected as profile picture.
The associated images and the profile picture can be used as a source of inspiration while building the character or later when writing the story.
Step 5: get to know the story of the character before the story’s beginning
The way of being of each of us, in every moment of our life, is determined by our character and by the experiences we have lived up to that moment.
For this reason, bibisco provides two tools for knowing the character’s life before the story begins.
The first tool is a dedicated section in which to describe the childhood, adolescence, school and professional life of a character up to the moment of the beginning of the story.
The second tool is a section in which to indicate the significant events of the character’s life, with dates and descriptions.
The events indicated in this section will then be merged into the novel’s general timeline.
Step 6: define the conflict of the character
As we discussed in detail in a previous post: no conflict, no novel!
Every main character has a conflict: a dream to be realized, a reaction to an external event, an inner need.
The conflict leads the character to action and thus to start the story.
bibisco has a dedicated section in which to describe the character’s conflict.
Step 7: define the evolution of the characters
Every story is the story of a change in the condition of things and the evolution of the characters during this process.
And the evolution of the characters is the most interesting aspect because it’s what excites, inspires or upsets us. It’s what we’ll remember when we forget the plot.
As discussed in a previous post, every author should always ask himself: can my readers see themselves in my characters?
bibisco has a dedicated section in which to describe the character’s evolution during the story.
Conclusion
This is how to master character creation in 7 Simple Steps.
Now it’s your turn! Download bibisco now and start creating characters your readers won’t forget.
