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Introduction
A. There are four sources available to you to create your cast of characters.
a. Yourself
b. Real people you know
c. Real people you hear about
d. Pure imagination

Yourself as Character: Straight from the Horse’s Mouth
A. In one sense, every character you create will be yourself. Our characters’ emotions draw on our own emotions.
B. You may want to use your life more directly and dramatize actual incidents. This technique has both strengths and weaknesses.
a. Strengths:
i. You know the concrete details and can get them right, which is invaluable in creating believable fiction.
ii. You felt whatever exaltation, fear, panic, tenderness, or despair the situation evoked. A well-done biographical incident can therefore have tremendous fictional power.
b. Weaknesses:
i. Almost no one can view himself objectively on the page. You are the character so you are too close to the character itself.
ii. You may know the true intent behind a character’s actions or that some actions may be balanced out by others, however, the reader does not and will not recognize this until it is too late. The reader only knows what’s on the page, not what’s in your mind and heart.

People You Know As Characters: Pardon Me While I Borrow Your Soul
A. Using people straight can, as in the case of using yourself, limit both imagination and objectivity.
B. Instead of creating a character with an identical personality to the person it relates to, use traits from that person but combine those traits with those of other people.
C. This technique has a few advantages:
a. You can craft exactly the character you need for your plot.
b. Combining characters gives you better flexibility.
c. Your friends and family are less likely to recognize themselves.
d. Avoids potential lawsuits.

Strangers as Characters: One Small Spark
A. You can base characters on people you don’t know personally but have only heard or read about.
B. This can work very well because you’re not bound by many facts.
Characters from Imagination: Fancy Runs Free
A. Creating purely invented characters is actually very similar to basing characters on strangers.

Stars, Featured Players, and Furniture
A. Not all your characters will matter equally to the story. One is the star – the protagonist. Your star gets the most attention from both the reader and writer, the most word count expended on him or her, and the climactic scene.
B. Changers are characters who alter in significant ways as a result of the events of your story. They learn something or grow into better or worse people, but by the end of the story they are not the same personalities they were in the beginning. Their change, in its various stages, is called the story’s emotional arc.

Auditioning Your Players
A. Whether your protagonist is a changer or a stayer, it gives you flexibility to make choices before you begin writing. Playing mentally with these choices can help you assemble the right characters for your cast.
B. To choose the appropriate characters for your story, you should consider the following questions:
a. Am I genuinely interested in this character?
i. Do I find myself thinking about him in odd moments
ii. Imagining his previous life?
iii. Inventing bits of dialogue?
iv. If you don’t then you won’t write him very well.
b. Is this character or situation fresh and interesting in some new way?
c. Can I maintain enough objectivity about this character, combined with enough identification, to practice the triple mind-set – becoming author, character, and reader as I write?
d. Do I want this character to be a stayer or a changer?
i. If she’s going to be a changer, does it feel as if she has the capacity to change through the emotional arc I plan for her?
ii. For an emotional arc to work, we must believe that the character is capable of change.

Putting It All Together: And The Lead Goes To…
A. When choosing the star of your story, consider the following:
a. What sparks your imagination?
b. Which characters appeal most to you?
c. Do you want to focus on a changer or a stayer?
i. If a changer, who seems to have the potential for genuine change?
d. Who could progress through an emotional arc you want to portray?


A Useful Tool: The Mini-Bio
A. Most writers keep a journal of seemingly useless facts, but to them this journal is an important tool at recalling different facts about their characters and the overall story rather than looking back through the manuscript.
B. Another useful tool for writers is the mini-bio. A mini-bio should be created for each major character of your cast and should be begun before you start writing to help you focus your thinking about a character.

Becoming the Reader, Redux
A. When reviewing the mini-bios for each of the major characters, you should consider the following:
a. Are there enough differences among the characters to provide variety?
b. Is it plausible that these people would know each other or can be brought to know each other through your planned story events?
c. Is the entire group so bland or depressed that no one will want to spend four hundred pages with them? (A few bland or depressing ones are fine)
d. Are these the people that might plausibly be found in your setting?
e. Do you have all the characters that circumstances logically require?

Recap: Assembling Your Cast
A. You have four sources from which to draw characters: yourself, people you know, strangers you hear or read about, and pure imagination. For the first three sources, characters are usually more effective when they are modified from their real-life models rather than used whole.
B. Once you have a list of potential characters for your story, the next step is to choose a protagonist, your star; the other characters will then become featured players. Any character can be chosen as your star, although different choices will result in much different stories.
C. One consideration in choosing your protagonist is whether you want to write about a character who is altered by story events (a changer) or one who remains essentially the same (a stayer). Changers progress through an emotional arc, a logical sequence of character alterations caused by the story’s action.
D. Before you start writing, try to examine your assembled cast, both changers and stayers, from the viewpoint of your potential reader. Are they interesting? Sufficiently diverse? Plausibly connected to each other and the situation you want to write about?
E. Your major characters, especially your protagonist(s), should be people you are genuinely excited about creating. You should know them well. If you can’t fill out a mini-bio on each major character in your book, you don’t yet know enough about that character to begin writing.

Exercises
A. Pick a novel or story you like and know well. Write a few sentences describing the protagonist at the start of the work: his attitudes, beliefs and behavior. Now write a few sentences describing that character at the end. Do you see any significant differences? Is the character a changer or a stayer? How would you describe his emotional arc?
B. Read (or reread) today’s newspaper, looking specifically for characters you would like to write about. These should be people that spark your individual imagination. If you find one, write down everything you actually know about this person. Now fill out a mini-bio, inventing answers to the other questions. Is this someone you might like to build a story around?
C. Fill out a mini-bio for your most interesting relative. When it’s complete, start changing answers. What if you keep Cousin Ann’s job (nurse) but change her attitude toward it (instead of loving it, she hates it)? What would a boisterous, quick-tempered person like Ann do if she hated nursing (besides quit)? What if you change her job to doctor? Presidential advisor? Hairdresser? What if you change her marital status or plunk her down in a much different setting (Regency, England)? Would Ann, with alterations, make a better character for something you might want to write?
D. Pick a story or book you know very well and list the major characters. Look at each one in turn and think how different the story would be if he were the star. You might, for instance, choose Sleeping Beauty. If Beauty were not the star but instead a featured player (maybe even a bit player who doesn’t show up until the end), who might star? Perhaps the prince, with the story becoming his struggle to find a bride. Perhaps one of those poor failed princes who died in the briar hedge before the hundred years were up. Perhaps the bad fairy that put a spell on Beauty – whatever happened to her after that?
E. Make a list of characters you either might want to write about or have begun to write about. Don’t worry if the list is not complete; three or four will do. Fill out a mini-bio for each, inventing as you go along. Now pick up and study each mini-bio. As each is in your hand, imagine that character as the star of your story. He will receive the most attention from you and the readers, the highest word count, the emotional arc (if there is one), and the climactic scene. Ask yourself the following questions:
a. How does the story change each time you recast it?
b. Which version do you like best? Why?