#they are very important to me. anyone have some fave alignment charts that i can waste time doing.

[justsurvival]

i am cringe but i am free (i did oc alignment charts for 9 of them that i love more than the others right now)

[battlestar-royco]

Hey! Sorry to ask but I was wondering if you had any tips on fleshing out characters and truly getting to, like, kNOW them and how they interact? I have a couple of characters and I know the basics of their personalities and their plots but they still don't 100% feel like real, fully-fleshed people to me? One of the most important things in a book (for me anyway) is the characters and their dynamics so this is a really big factor for me and I nEED to get it right akdjd

No need to apologize. This issue plagues me as well! I’ve actually been struggling with it myself this week. When characters don’t come to me naturally, I have a few strategies:

Character interview. Pretty basic, but a good place to start. Rick Riordan has a very intensive one on his website, which I’ve been using on and off for like a decade now.

Write notes about their life before the story starts, or maybe even a scene or short story from before the story starts in their POV. I only do this when I’m really struggling, but it’s always fun because 99% of the time it’ll never show up in the final product. It’s like a little pre-canon fic, just for me. It also helps you think about your world temporally, if you’re writing 5, 10, 20 years in the past. Now you know what it was like back then, culturally, politically, technologically etc!

Literally just write down “what is my goal with the character?/what do I want this character to be?” and drabble from there. This works really well for me. If I don’t know the answer yet, this forces me to find it or at least write down whatever comes to my mind and formulate something from there. When I do know the answer, I compare what the character *is* in the current draft to what I ideally envision the character *to be.* That helps me spot discrepancies between the two versions and map a path to where I’m trying to go.

Moodboards. Mostly a waste of time for me, tbh, but fun if you’re seriously stuck. At least you get a feel for the aesthetic, which is really important for some writers.

Choose a few models. Are you inspired by anyone irl, or maybe by other characters? I wouldn’t explicitly base a character on one specific person or other character, for many ethical and personal reasons, but it’s definitely not bad to look at your own faves, analyze why they’re your faves, and try to emulate your own interpretation.

Graphs and alignment charts. Sounds boring, but can be super fun if you’re into visual aids and color coding. I put one of mine under the cut!

Sorry if you can’t fully read it; it wasn’t really meant for other people’s eyes. I omitted full names, but basically I bulleted the main ~vibe~ I wanted for each unique dynamic in the friend group, and I refer to it once in a while as I write to make sure I’m maintaining said vibe:

Hope that helps!