Character Development & Being a Professional Author

Video Transcript

"REBECCA SATO: Hi. I'm Rebecca with ExpertVillage.com. And we're going to talk about character development and how to create really great characters that people are passionate about. And it doesn't matter if they love them or they hate them or they love to hate them, preferably a little of everything. Not necessarily with the same character, that will be a little conflicted, but with a range of characters that people are having this emotional experience and are able to identify with these people as they read. And right now, I'm talking primarily about stories whether it's short stories or novels, but this actually also applies to all kinds of writing even copywriting and advertising and if you're writing a storyboard for a commercial. I mean, you still want to know how to develop good characters. But primarily, I'll be talking about it from the standpoint of traditional story. So one thing that I find to be very helpful and that a lot of really great writers have mentioned--and these are writers who are rich and famous so it's obviously worked for them--is to develop a really great character. It helps to have a little bit of information but not too much information. So what they do is they pick someone for each character that they think kind of embodies that character, someone who realizes that they know but that they don't know too well. And what they do is every time they're writing from that character's perspective or about that character, they will think what would that person that I know do, how would they react, how would they sound, how would they look and kind of look at that from that perspective. And what's nice is that it's not someone that you know super well and so there's still a lot of room for imagination and creative interpretation which, I think, is very important and we should let it do that. So basically, you have this really great base where you know the person enough that you have something to start with but you don't know him so well that it takes away their wonder. So try that with your characters and that should really give you something to start with, a really great framework."