Character Building Guide - Part 1: Introduction

Hello! Welcome to my character building guide for authors. I intend this to be a comprehensive guide towards building characters. This is a long term goal that will be built over the next few months, and I will continue to develop for years going forward. I don't personally follow all of these steps when building characters. To get an idea of my process, you can read my blog post titled Character Building in 4 Steps - http://brianbasham.blogspot.com/2013/07/character-building-in-4-steps.html. I have tried all of the methods listed in this guide at least once.

You can bookmark this post for future use as I will update the Table of Contents as additional information is added to the guide. If you have any ideas or suggestions for the guide then please leave them in the comments.

How to Use This Guide

This guide is intended to help authors develop characters for use in works of fiction. Writing is a highly subjective pursuit with an infinite number of ways to do it. This guide contains suggestions on how you can develop or get to know characters. Please keep in mind that sections that aren't useful to you might be useful to others. Take what works for you and leave the rest behind.

The posts will be broken up into sections as this guide grows. Portions of posts within each section may seem redundant as there are many ways to accomplish the same goals. To ensure this is a comprehensive guide there will be some overlap in topics.

Table of Contents

Part 1: Introduction - This page
Part 2: Getting Started
Part 3: Describing the Character
Part 4: Basic Attributes

Structure of Posts

Each post in this guide will have the same structure as outlined below.

• Topic - A brief description of the topic that will be covered and the method used in the current post.
• Method - A longer description of how to reach the goal of the post step by step. There may be more than one method for each topic, but each method will have it's own post.
• Example - A detailed example using the steps described to build a character that will be developed over the course of the guide.
• Use - How to use the information in the example while writing fiction.

I hope you all enjoy this guide. Please leave any comments and/or suggestions in the comments. Thank you for reading!