Can anyone recommend a really good book on creating/writing characters? I really need some solid help on this one!
Many thanks,
Susiex

It's a difficult one. The books of this kind I've picked up have all seemed too formulaic and applying the formulae seemed to suck the life out of whatever inspiration for the character was there to start off with.

There is one book I've found extraordinarily helpful in the area of the deeper stuff - characters' motivation and development, e.g. their 'journey' in the novel from x to y, rashness to maturity, egocentricity to self-sacrifice for the greater cause, etc., etc - is one that doesn't set out specifically to address character at all. It's The Seven Basic Plots (Why we tell stories) by Christopher Booker. It's fantastic ('exhilarating' Fay Weldon said) but very long. For the fundamentals, it's definitely the business. On the other hand, as far as the character's detail and personality are concerned, it won't be any help at all!

Chris

Thanks, Chris. That's reminded me that I must get that book - it keeps being mentioned as the best!
Yes, so many books on character development do seem rather formulaic - am hoping someone on WW has come across a really helpful one - or a workshop or course or ANYTHING really. I'm on my second draft and one main character is one-dimensional, and I'm racking my brains as to how to make her more rounded.
Susiex

Is she one-dimensional to others? I know that there's often a character in my work who I find pretty transparent, in that I haven't deliberately set out to characterise her. She's the one that everyone else says is like me...

I've never found the 'traditional' kind of character development useful - making lists of their background/hobbies/clothes/tastes etc., but I do find it helpful to think out characters in opposition to one another. Rather as, when Disney has a pair of friends one is always short and fat and the other tall and thin (or short/thin, tall/fat, think Asterix and Obelix).

I also find it helpful to think in terms of opinions and motivations, as much or more than clothes and food. So I take, say the four main characters and for each of them ponder:

puritan or sybarite?
aggressive, passive agressive or genuinely laid back?
What would each of them do faced with a car accident to them? To a stranger?
glass half-empty or glass half-full?
clumsy, dextrous, quick-moving or slow?
eat a lot, a little, fussy about food?
how would each while away a train journey?

you can also do this with their voice - as dialogue and narrator if they are: long/short sentences, complicated/simple syntax, lots of metaphors/everything factual and so on.

Of course some may be the same: people are often like their siblings or their spouses in some things, and very unlike them in others, for example.

Even if you start by doing this rather mechanically - just tossing a coin as to who has which characteristics, then making them as opposite as possible to each other, they soon begin to take on a life of their own. And because you've thought in terms of opposites, they seem more, say, assertive, because it's up against the other one's passivity.

Emma

Susan Hill did a post or two on characters. There are some useful tips here:

http://blog.susan-hill.com/blog/CREATIVEWRITINGCOURSE/_archives/2007/10/1/3264465.html

(Monday, October 1 CW COURSE TTD 3)

Why don't you look at some Stanislavski. His Building a Character is nominally for actors but so much of it is relevant to writers. Formulaic and schematic it ain't.

Thanks, Naomi and Cherys - looks like some very useful tips to follow up.
Emma, thanks for your suggestions, as ever. And yes, someone else has said it: A fellow writer told me that this character (one of my two main characters) is one-dimensional compared with others.
Trouble is, this character is one who is very like me (urgh).
Susiex

Trouble is, this character is one who is very like me (urgh).

Scary, isn't it. But that's actually a clue: it may be so obvious to you why this character does as she does, what she looks like and sounds like and thinks like, that you simply haven't give the reader (who's starting from zero, as it were) enough to go on.

One of the things that's always cropping up in novels I do reports on is that the writer evokes the tropical island/alien spaceship/Himalayan foothills in loving and evocative detail, and then there's this suburb/high street/Victorian semi, which I can't picture at all. I now say, 'Forgive me if I'm wrong, but is this your suburb/street/house?' It always is - it's so vivid to them they can picture it with almost no help from the words on the page, only of course the rest of us can't...

Emma

Very good point, Emma! My two main characters are the two halves of myself and I've struggled with both, though one is apparently working OK. I've just sent off my submission package to Hilary Johnson, so will be interesting to see what her reader says. I do feel that creating characters are the most challenging part of writing a novel (for me, anyway). If only they arrived, Athena-like and fully-formed from my head!
Susiex

I've heard that Nancy Kress is good on characterisation. I got one of her books - Characters, Emotions and Viewpoint – which looks good on a superficial glance through, although I haven’t really got into it yet.

Dee

Thanks, Dee
Will look it up on amazon.
Susiex

The most useful thing I ever read was an interview with a radio drama writer.
In it she said that because the listener can neither see nor be told about the character it must be shaped entirely from what it does and says.
She suggested that you imagine your character in three very different scenarios - in the shower, at a meal with friends, at a funeral - were her examples. Now imagine what your character does and says during each. Does she sing wildly in the shower, talk to herself? At the meal does she talk with her mouthful or refuse wine? At a funeral does she comfort the bereaved or swallow her own tears? Imagine everything she says or does.
When this is done you should have the core of a person.
HB x

That's a good one, helen. I might try that for my next novel characters. I like the idea of the shower and how they might behave!
Susiex

Cherys mentioned Stanislavski, and I think the basic Stanislavskian question can be really useful. Rather than (or as well as) thinking from the outside in, you keep asking yourself, 'What is this character trying to do?' for every time they speak or act. The rule in drama is you have to phrase it as a verb - no general emoting allowed - 'to persuade', 'to block', 'to seduce' - and I think it can be extremely useful. If you think hard about what the intention (conscious or unconscious) is behind every action (including speech) then you find the character builds itself, because every action is rooted in a real reason powering the story forward, and adding up to a really strong sense of what makes this character tick.

Oooh, Emma, I really like this. I have to say that I've never really visualised my characters from the outside, and am much more interested in what pushes them to behave as they do. That's a great rule! And would make each exchange really powerful and real.
Thanks.
Susiex