Desiderius Price

When I create a character, I’ll use a bit of software to randomly select things from a list (in a file). So, I start by creating random lists of traits, hobbies, phobias, and allergies; then sort, sift the lists until I settle on something reasonable. Give ‘em a birthday, unless there’s a compelling story reason, I’ll roll the dice. Then work out from there; for instance are they married? Cheating? Single? With kids? Without? Have living family? Occupation? Favorite color? etc.... A story or two is good too. More details, the better, for a main character. (Obviously, for a side character, or just a place holder, you don’t need as much). An indicator of a good workup means you should be able to answer … “For their birthday, their best friend (name) gave them ______.” I do lean a bit on the random pickers simply because I’ve had to create so many in my works, and this helps me make sure they each have something distinctively different. I also try to write this stuff down, because even if I don’t need to know the character has a shellfish allergy today, it could come in useful later (in my particular case, I changed it to an oyster allergy, letting me get that specific character sick w/o getting everybody else sick). At a certain point, each character does have a bit of me in it, implicitly. However, the goal I’ve got is so that a reader can take any (mildy-complex) quotation from the story, and be able to attribute it to the proper character. Is this perfect? Nope. I just hope it makes for a more interesting story. (btw, missing limbs can also add some flavor...where’s my machete? ).

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Last night, left Harry bleeding profusely on the floor. Just hold on there, lemme sleep a full night on it while you’ve got life-threatening injuries….. I wouldn’t make for a very good ER doctor.

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@JayDee You’re too talented to be capable of writing the worst story….. just saying

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So, this old fanfic is a pain in the neck?

Definitely not removing it, nor do I think I’ve got the best writing. Heck, english/lit was my most hated subject back in school, and I sucked at it, just scraping by enough to pass. Nor is writing like this common among my peers in my line of work, so I’m definitely of the opinion that it can always get better. And better I’ve generally gotten, you can even see it *in* that first story; even some of the reviews commented on this. That first story started off with present tense, script like, and wordy; but I’ve learned to focus the dialogue a bit more, add in detail, and even put in the occasional “mental peek” inside a character’s head. In that story’s sequel (which I’m now revising, again), I had thought was to mix in some first person POVs, but unless it’s just one character, that plain is hard to follow. Another improvement that I thought was good was long chapters, to try to make it “less” intimidating, so I clumped the chapters together into mega-chapters… until I realized I had 11 chapters for 500k…. one of them was 107k, so I had the Prisoner of Azkaban in a single chapter, with really lousy formatting so it was all together. Strangely enough, people still read and reviewed it. My current revision effort is undoing *that* change, undoing some of the edits that I had made along the way. So, yeah, it’s definitely been a learning process, even bought some how-to-books on improving my writing (only partially read). Having @CL Mustafic do a bit of reading/feedback on my original material helped a bit too. Biggest tip I’d make is to avoid write+post, to set the draft aside for a some time, after a bit of the next chapter has been written, before going back to proofread; as I find that waiting makes it easier to spot typos/grammar/etc – sure, not perfect, but it cuts out most of the bad stuff, and it’s a nice balance for posting serially for fanfiction/amateur writing.

Bloodshot eyes could just be a symptom of something else….

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NoSex for all … and doom the human race.

You know how it goes, try one code, and next you know, you’re wanting them all (except for NoSex….)

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Poor dragons, always getting teased by the other kids on how they can’t even blow out candles on a birthday cake!

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