Create Compelling Characters

By Carla Acheson

Do you struggle with making your fictional characters come to life? This guide offers you many "PROVEN" successful techniques in how to form a "three-dimensional" character. Learn everything you need to know to make your fictional characters believable, interesting, and completely realistic.

It also includes useful exercises that will help you get to grips with creating compelling characters that truly come to life and that your readers will absolutely love!

Includes topics such as:
* Creating a personality from scratch.
* Dealing with common stereotypes.
* Character relationships.
* Interesting ways to describe your characters.
* Creating a believable background.
* Character Development.
* Motivation.
* Character Profiling.
* Inner conflict.
* Character diversity.

Filled with many tips, helpful suggestions, prompts and exercises to help you improve your characterisation skills.

"CREATE COMPELLING CHARACTERS" guides you towards understanding what makes fictional characters memorable to readers.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Carla Acheson
• Release date: Jan 19, 2020
• ISBN: 9781393323006

Book preview

Copyright © 2020 Carla Acheson

All Rights Reserved.

This book, or any portion thereof, may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher.

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Table of Contents

Foreword

What is a Character?

Personality

Showing Versus Telling.

Stereotyping

Background Stereotypes

Physical Attributes

How Much Description?

Inventing Characters

Names

Appearance

Background

Making Characters Believable

Relationships

Habits and Quirks

Individuality

Strengths and Weaknesses

Motivation

The 16 basic desires

Clichéd Motivations

Conflict

Character Development

Character Profiling

Character File Sheet

Character Analysis

Character Diversity

Creative Writing Exercises

Stranger in the room.

Character Values

A New You

What I think of you

Character Role Play

Interviewee Guide

Interviewer Guide

Thank you for reading...

More writing help...

Recommended Reading

Author Biography

Character is like a tree and reputation like a shadow. The shadow is what we think of it, the tree is the real thing.

Abraham Lincoln

Foreword

One of the most interesting aspects of fiction writing, in my opinion, is characterisation.

Most of us think that we are all fairly individual in character, but in truth, if you were to gather together a large group of people you will find many resembling mannerisms, motivations and goals as well as personality traits.

So what is it that makes a unique and great character stand out in fiction? One that will live on in your reader’s mind long after they have finished reading the last chapter of your book.

The answer to this question is you need to create a realistic character with an interesting personality, someone with a backstory, flaws, quirks, habits, and opinions of his own.

In many ways your character should be larger than life, colourful, and be able to cope with some of the exceptional difficulties life will hurl at him. Most importantly he must be believable.

Your character can be a talking boot, or a furry walking alien, but without the right elements that make them feel real to the reader, they will slide straight off the page and into the reader’s memory of badly written books.

In this e-book I show you how to create exciting and vivid characters, because a good fictional character is not created simply by a good physical description, but a whole host of other elements. The characters you want to create are the types that make your reader want to know deeply and will hate departing from at the end of your book. You will learn how to develop your character’s personality, motivations, habits,

fears and desires, as well as making them sound real through their speech.

Every heroine or hero in a book should come alive, so that the reader never finds them dull or boring.

Lastly, I’d like to thank you for choosing to download this e-book, and hope that it provides you with inspiration and motivation to create some dynamic and well developed characters in your stories.

Here’s to your writing success.

Carla Acheson

What is a Character?

Referencing the dictionary, ‘character’ is described as follows:

Character: Individuality, personality, referring to the sum of the characteristics possessed by a person. Refers especially to moral qualities, ethical standards, principles, and the like.

In the world of fiction our common aim is to invent completely new and unique characters. If you think about the multitude of facets that are required to create a whole new person you would be rather amazed.

Here are just a few examples of elements