Character Development Lessons: 02 Past Traits · 4:34am Nov 25th, 2013
Character Development
02 Past Traits
Greetings students! Welcome back to another lesson. Today, we are covering character traits and how they relate to the characters past.
A characters trait is a small part of what makes a character, a bunch of them together build them up, like organs. The more traits your character has, the more lively he/she is and the more believable they are.
These traits can be nearly anything and effect everything about the character. I'll do a little chart to show you as well as explain what I mean by traits being similar to organs.
Head: Mindset, like a hatred or like towards a certain object, person, or ideal.
Neck: Reactions, how steady they breath when faced with something that opposes their mindset to cause them to disrupt.
Shoulders: A weight, something from their past that is connected to their mindset so it stays in place, constantly reminding them of something they need to do or something they can never allow.
Arms: Their violence, what will push them to react to a situation violently, or at all, and how would they attack? Sometimes, the characters words are their weapon.
Heart: A deeper connection that can spread to others they meet or even objects that share or add to the characters purpose.
Stomach: What food they eat. I'm serious here, you can define a character by what they eat, sometimes going with or against theirs and others mindsets.
Digestive system: How long and how efficiently it takes them to make sense of an idea that is foreign to them or how long it takes to react to a new situation.
Sexual Organs: What brings out their love, what kind of ideal of person they are looking for that they can fall in love with. Some characters might be more focused on lust rather than love, depending on their sexual mindset.
Upper legs (Cause I can't name every part of the body): What they stand on, their principles they live by that determines their thoughts and understanding of others actions.
Feet: The characters momentum, their drive, whatever gets them up in the morning to go do whatever it is they have to do. Some characters can lose their feet due to events, like the loss of someone important, that takes away the standing point of the character and they fall.
Those are the body traits, and when making a character like this it's called 'Body Building'.
Past that, there is the more important and more obvious part of their character, the soul traits. These traits effect everything about the body, and can be limited to certain things.
For example, these could be one characters soul traits. They are over optimistic, and can take bad situations in their stride. Yet despite that, when situations constantly push down on them, they shatter easily. They are set on gaining approval, doing what they can to gain the trust and understanding they desire from the people around them.
I just explained teenage girls in a nutshell.
Now that you (hopefully) understand one of the many ways you can create the basis for a character, you need a back-story.
A characters back story explains everything about them, from what happened on the day they were born to the now. This must be done with every character that lasts more than three chapters, and can take a lot of work; but one thing stands above all that. The back story of a character is not for the readers, it is for you! You must understand your own character better than anyone. You aren't writing the story to understand your own characters, you're writing a story to introduce some friends to a wide audience.
An example of a great character with no back story to explain her behaviour is, once again, Rin! Despite her amazingly unique personality, you never learn anything about her past. She simply is. And that is a great thing.
That is also the gap in back stories, sometimes there is not certain event or tragedy in their lives that made them who they are, some times they just are. Pulling off one of these types of characters is difficult however, so it's best to keep with the back story plan in place, just in case. Especially with longer stories, where you have more time to explore the character for who they are.
Please note that most of the methods in these lessons I make up on the spot, and aren't tried and tested.
Class is Dismissed!
Yet another great lesson teach, well I'm going to sleep in the next class, so see ya around.