Demon Soul, the making of part 2: Creation of the characters

En français

I always start creating a story with a quick idea that will later give the beginning. Here that was Brownie staying alone when Yue left. As this is the start of the story you can imagine that at this particular point I was supposed to go further and to start writing what follows. Of course I will but I still had a little bit of something to do first and that was creating my main character Brownie. That for, I use questions and lists.
Questions are really basics first and tend to get more complicated. For instance you can ask yourself what is the favorite color or food of the characters so that it will determine the environment around them like the decoration in their bedrooms, how they react to the meals. And also give some basic characteristic about them, like for example what they look like. The look was easier a bit as I use a game so I could basically see their pictures.
And here, I also had to wonder what happened between Yue and Brownie, why they felt in love? Why they separated? Why Brownie was behaving the way she did? For each answer I write a little paragraph that would eventually appear or not in the story. For example some of what happens between Brownie and Yue appears as flashback or memories.
I also said that I use lists. That is main qualities and main default of the characters. Also a bit of what they like and dislike and for each of those I also write a little paragraph. It is really easy to give a list of quality and default. Writing a paragraph about how the character gets it will allow you to have a consistent behavior and to make sure that the characters doesn’t behave contractor to themselves. The list doesn’t have to be long. You can start with 5 qualities and 5 defaults, you can always add more as the story progresses.
So here was the birth of Brownie and of her relationship Yue. I also created Yue in the same way. He would of course stay a lot less developed than Brownie as he appears only through her.
The other characters will be created as they appear. I have a all bunch of very basic characters just ready to be developed, for example when I first needed Gideon, I knew he was a wizard and really good with his magic wand but that was about it. I had to start with the questions and lists to built him a past and see how he was going to develop in the story and how the story was going to develop around him. And that is valid for every character in the story even insignificant ones. You never really know when a character is going to do something remarkable so you need to be prepare when this day come, but as I said before as the relationship between the characters and the story is very narrow, you don’t need to prepare them all before the story you can create them during the story. That allows you to take a break from the plot and especially you can always introduce surprise characters like the twins, Taram and Torin or Seti.

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