Creating Characters with Personality

#1
It's taken me awhile to fully grasp this, but I finally understand it now.  In a typical dialogue we try and make our protagonist perfect.  He will make the most logical choice you can think of for the most logical reasoning you can think of.  This is how we fail in giving a character personality.  

Personality is the flaws in a character rather than the strengths of the character.  For instance:

-a lisp
-A racist biggot
-Someone who sings their dialog
etc

These are flaws that make a character interesting.  

Perfect characters are boring characters, but at the same time, we have to remember that the protagonist has to be likable.  Thus, we need a balance.  A character we hate isn't one that I want to read about.  So we wanna make our character as interesting as possible but also understandable.  People who are trying to do the right thing, but sometimes the right thing just isn't so easy to grasp.  

Take Hyodo Issei from High School DXD, his character I would say goes to far into the pervert personality.  Every scene we're drowned in his overbearing personality and it's too much.  You want an enjoyable pervert, look at Quark in Star Trek Deep Space Nine.  I seriously love that character, just subtle enough to be interesting, but you don't hate him for it. In fact, I'd say I even understand where he comes from.  It's Ferenghi tradition to treat woman like objects, if anything I'd even call him a Ferenghi with higher than average morales.  In one episode he feels horrible about selling weapons to some foreign dictator and can't sleep after.

RE: Creating Characters with Personality

#2
"Personality" is the total sum of all the qualities of a character, physical, emotional, and mental. It's strengths and flaws, but mostly a bunch of characteristics that are either completely neutral or good/bad depending on circumstance.

A character whose favourite colour is blue is not better or worse than one whose favourite is red, but an author should know which character likes what colour. One character may love dancing while another is devoted to music. One may be cold and logical, always making rational decisions, while another is warmly emotional, making a great, empathetic friend but sometimes having passion overrule reason.

A character with personality is one that is fully fleshed out. Many characters don't have personality because 1. They have no strong characteristics; 2. They only have one extremely strong characteristic and no range of emotions; or 3. They have extremely unrealistic motivations, emotions, and reactions.

Get to know your characters as fully 3-dimensional people. You don't need to know every tiny detail about them, but if someone asks you a random question like "what's your MC's favourite food?", you should be able to come up with an answer that fits their personality within 30 seconds.

RE: Creating Characters with Personality

#3
One of the aspects of creating characters is the idea of a "Pre-Story Life" and "Quirks" based on those events. When writing, you want people to think that your characters had a life before they entered the events of the story. Characters also shouldn't be as complex as the average writer makes them out to be. Their personality should involve "Quirks". These quirks can be something as simple as hating a color, or could be always doing the same routine before going to sleep. These quirks mark them as being different from other characters, but always make sure that a character doesn't have too many. You never want to end up writing yourself into a corner because your plot outline involves one thing, but you main character was written in a way that won't allow the ending to take place because (s)he would never end up doing those things. Characters should be human and normal, they can -most of the time- be malleable when it comes to situations. And always make sure that you can explain things through their backstory and history.

Err, yeah...I hope that kinda made sense..........just my thoughts on the subject

RE: Creating Characters with Personality

#4
I think the individual likes and dislikes of a character aren't really that important, but being consistent about established likes and dislikes is. A character won't enthrall anyone just because they enjoy music or they state their favorite band.  I would actually advocate not to even bother listing out petty favorites, if it matches with a reader's interests, they might nod their head at best saying "Yea! I like that too." but the vast majority of people will just fall asleep listening to a bland recital of interests. 

it's how they use their likes and dislikes to develop reader interest that matters.  Ignoring them is bad, but by themselves, they're boring information.  

Quote:She sank into the corner like a log listening to the radio.  The party was loud, but she didn't care, until something changed.

A slow song with a steady beat started playing on the radio and her eyes popped open as she registered the music.  Quickly she got up and ran to the shelf, grabbing a small device.  Pressing the large red button, an ear piercing sound overtook the room and people either stopped to look for the source or covered their ears.  

The room became quiet and the music on the radio was the only sound left in the room.  With all eyes staring at her, Maggy said, "This is my favorite song."

Although I would like to state that this guide is more about defining how to build personality in a character, not developing three dimensional characters.  For that, something like this guide would work.
http://www.publishingcrawl.com/2014/08/01/writing-3-dimensional-characters/
Mainly it's about fleshing out how your characters make their decisions.  Decisions are influenced by motives, emotions, and consequences.  In every scene, a writer needs to keep track of those.  Make sure they are clearly defined in every scene as well.  Holding back information for some shallow sense of mystery is exactly what you want to avoid.  

That's not to say there shouldn't be mystery, but if your character knows the answer to something and the scene is about that something, he should explain it somehow to the reader.  Even if all he says is "I don't know why it does this." At least then the reader knows you aren't holding out on them.  The point is to give the reader all the relevant information that your point-of-view character is privy to.  This helps readers understand why your character does something which may not make perfect sense otherwise.  We want strange quirky characters that make sense to people.

RE: Creating Characters with Personality

#5
'unice5656' pid='263320' dateline='1436074044' Wrote: "Personality" is the total sum of all the qualities of a character, physical, emotional, and mental. It's strengths and flaws, but mostly a bunch of characteristics that are either completely neutral or good/bad depending on circumstance.

A character whose favourite colour is blue is not better or worse than one whose favourite is red, but an author should know which character likes what colour. One character may love dancing while another is devoted to music. One may be cold and logical, always making rational decisions, while another is warmly emotional, making a great, empathetic friend but sometimes having passion overrule reason.

A character with personality is one that is fully fleshed out. Many characters don't have personality because 1. They have no strong characteristics; 2. They only have one extremely strong characteristic and no range of emotions; or 3. They have extremely unrealistic motivations, emotions, and reactions.

Get to know your characters as fully 3-dimensional people. You don't need to know every tiny detail about them, but if someone asks you a random question like "what's your MC's favourite food?", you should be able to come up with an answer that fits their personality within 30 seconds.

I really like this. I recently realized while talking to someone about producing artwork for my MC in my current fiction that I had no clue what type of clothes my main character wore. I was a bit disappointed in myself at first, but it's for sure something that I plan on working on in the future with my characters, is knowing their personalities and how to reflect them in depth.
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RE: Creating Characters with Personality

#6
On the topic of perfect characters, I find it silly at times when a modern character is thrown into a fantasy world and instantly adapts.

They run around killing people without any doubts or trauma involving them taking someone else's life. Unless, they're some sort of sociopath, this seems very unlikely, and a sociopath isn't really easy to relate with.
Magic? Meh, getting used to it within minutes and possibly even becoming some sort of grandmaster. They don't get freaked out by monsters or people conjuring up flames. Remember, it takes time for people to get used to their new environment, especially when it goes against everything they ever thought they knew.

Reincarnation is not necessarily bad by itself, but many writers use it as a crutch to make the character perfect (they have special abilities, hidden techniques, adult knowledge, etc.) rather than to actually go anywhere with it.