Hardest Part of Writing Your Character

[Flamebird]

What do you find the most challenging when writing your character? Any aspect that you struggle with or find hard to do. Anything ranging from backstory to personality to their favorite food?


Ashla: She's so unoriginal, her backstory is so broken, she has so many plot holes, cliches, and mary sue esc problems... I'll try to find a way to save her character. She was the first character I ever made on this site, the character and the writer grew up together. I don't want to give up on her but she's sooooo baaaaaaaadddddddddddd! Also, I loved her first two outfits, but I could never settle on a look for her after that.
Felicity I absolutely love writing this character! She feels interesting and even original. The thing I majorly struggle with writing with her is her confrontational side and anger issues. Because I'm the complete opposite. I despise any and all forms of conflict. Even hearing yelling from across a room can upset me. So I've got a character who welcomes conflict and has temper tantrums, can easily bump heads with other characters, so... I can get really upset and defensive when writing my own character at times xD I also struggle to portray her anger and PTSD in a realistic, "accurate" light and balance her dark and light sides out.

[Yvonne]

I would firstly like to mention how awesome this thread idea really is. Fel is full of great ideas. Identifying what you find challenging to embody about your character can help you understand what you find fun and interesting when roleplaying them. I think there's a direct correlation there, between what's difficult about your character and what keeps you coming back to write for them again and again.

Don't be afraid to give your character qualities that you yourself don't possess currently in your own life. By doing this you decide, "Hey, that path toward personal growth over there... I think I can walk it a while."

If something about your character bores you or curls your lip in distaste, plan right now how to change it. Characters naturally evolve over time throughout their experiences with others. Your creativity isn't imprisoned by how your character is at the moment. Examples? Is your character too sad? Have someone do really nice things for them, have them buy your character flowers, give them hugs, pay attention and genuinely talk with them. Too happy? Have someone utterly ruin their day, take their favourite pet to the pound, pour an icy drink over their head, etc. You can change nearly everything about your character. You simply have to think about how and then execute your plan.

All that said, if you find your character is doing things that inspire fear in you, I would encourage you to stay the course, steady as she goes! Be brave! I'm here to support you! We all are. You're on the right track to developing yourself and improving your own life. Roleplaying sites are like ninety five percent perfectly safe learning grounds for you to become a better version of you, through your character/s.

Anywho, enough rambling from Yvy. Back on topic says I!

The hardest thing about roleplaying Yvonne... is how incredibly strong-minded she is, despite all of her "theoretical" social flaws. She's a woman, she's black-skinned, she's short enough to trip over, she's part elf with pointy ears, she's physically weak, slow, uncoordinated... there's probably more that aren't coming to mind. She doesn't speak without an accent in the way. Despite all of these things which make us insecure as human beings, intimidated by the opposites of these qualities, Yvonne works with what she's got to work with and projects herself onto the world and people around her.

I'm very introverted in person. I prefer to avoid social situations altogether, especially crowds. Yvonne is like my conduit for expressing all of the things, the things I wish I had the guts to say at the time in real life. Yvonne inspires her author every time she opens her mouth. It's a euphoric feeling, voicing some of her dialogue.

I think it's funny now, Philomel judged my first vignette and mentioned I needed to work on Yvonne's voice. She was so right, but she helped to create a little monster! Haha.

[Breaker]

The hardest thing about writing Breaker at this point is definitely keeping the reader sympathetic with him. I've been criticized in the past for him being "too strong" or "too skilled". What I think some people don't realize is that this is by design. I've been writing Josh for over ten years, taking him all the way from a simple martial artist in a strange land to the man-sized behemoth he is today. My goal in the past few years with him has been just that; to find ways to make his story interesting DESPITE the fact that he's at the end of his character arc. I seem to have finally keyed on to something strong with the way I portrayed his quest for godliness in Faith United. The next big challenge for writing Breaker: finding an elegant way to retire him into the Thayne pantheon as an NPC and replace him with a new character.

[FennWenn]

Man, I love Fenn to death, but he can be a tricky character to handle. He’s a “child” character, for one thing. Those are really, really hard to balance; there’s a lot of ways they can go wrong. I struggle to reign in his annoyance factor at times. I worry that I write him more cutesy than he has any right to be. I wonder if his struggle to be seen as some kind of equal with adults is too overpowering at times. Too much, too grating. Do I embrace his immaturity as an eternal and (potentially) endearing part of his personality, or do I grow him up a little mentally? I’m not sure.

Another thing that I have trouble with is the fact that he is absolutely not a combat-ready character (and maybe never will be) even though I like (and need to practice) writing action scenes. Though, that’s a good kind of challenging. I’m starting to realize that to write a good story with Fenn, I might have to try to avoid writing brute-force conflicts and figure out how to use his unusual skillset to its fullest. How I use him needs to better match how I built him.

I can still write him in action scenes. They just have to be ones where raw power isn’t the central factor determining success.

[Lilthis]

I’m new here and haven’t been writing long. There’s a few things I wanted to achieve with Lilthis though that have proven to create unique challenges. First, I wanted her to prove the clear dichotomy that intellect and wisdom are very separate things. It can be hard to balance the notion that yes, this character is smart even though they are doing an incredibly stupid thing right now. I constantly worry that I’m making her sound dumb ha.

Second, I wanted to create a character in a fantasy world that was not especially fantastic... but this proves a problem I haven’t had to worry about much yet but will in the future. I don’t want her to be a stereotypically weak damsel in distress who relies on others to keep her safe. I wanted her to come from that place but to progress towards strength. That’s hard because I essentially have to out think situations (since that’s what she will have to do in order to overcome obstacles).

Finally, magic isn’t real. Thinking of how real world physics or technology could intersect with something that is supernatural can be hard to write about.

@Flamebird, I like reading Felicity’s stuff. I bet you’re being a bit too hard on Ashla. Just having a character that has grown with you makes for an incredibly interesting character!

[Shinsou Vaan Osiris]

The greatest challenge for me with Shinsou is dealing with the fallout of the Gisela pairing against Storm, who IC was a staunch ally and a partner. It may seem ridiculous, but me being pitted against Storm in the tournament completely went against everything me and him had built with our Cleansing Corruption JC and were building with the Brotherhood and, because of the nature of the tournament, we felt obliged to "follow the leader" and create a storyline that underpinned why the two would even be fighting in the first place. It was like Shinsou's plot had been taken over and shit on by Rian Johnson after careful nurturing by JJ Abrams. I lost pretty much all motivation for the tournament after that (sorry Storm) because I couldn't buy into the direction it forced on us, and even though we attempted to find a way around it, I felt it was too forced and artificial.

To somehow get past all this, I ended up writing a complete tangent arc where Shin resigned his commission in the Brotherhood. This was the exact opposite of what I wanted and if it weren't for Shinsou and Breaker / Philomel having a seperate, reasonably justifiable story together I probably would have either killed Shinsou off entirely or started a new character.

Which, by the way, I am still considering.

[Elthas]

I know me personally I maintain several alts. (Nosdyn/Elthas/Lorenor)

With Elthas especially (Because I've written out a complex back-story for him) it's difficult to keep him an optimistic good guy. I've always envisioned Elthas as more of a heroic dood, as well as Lorenor. But that gets difficult to write at points in my solo projects which have a tendency to get all over the place sometimes. -laughs- But aside from that, I think the biggest issues I have with my own characters is keeping them consistent. Some of the mods who have judged my work have pointed that problem out in my threads too.

It's something I have been working on quite a bit. I remember doing a solo quest some time ago and I had let it collect dust for some time. When I got back to working on it, I had completely screwed up an entire sequence and I had to edit out the entire event so the event in question would flow better. Those of you who know me well know that I HATE editing of any kind lol. I'm the type of writer that likes to just write for the sheer pleasure of writing and as such editing slows me down a lot but I will do so if I have made some kind of really bad mechanical error.

But yes, back on topic I think the biggest problem I have is my own consistency. Nosdyn is a fun character to write as because he is a Demon from Haidia. So I use him a way to channel out all my rage and frustrations. However, I also tend to write my characters (And this has become more true the older I've gotten) with a tendency to make them gray-area if that makes sense. So my Heroes are more like Batmen/Punisher, and my Villains have some kind of a twisted sense of honor code. But yeah I'll chime in more later in this thread.

~Pav

[Flamebird]

It's been really hard writing Felicity's character flaws well. She's a "heroine" who has a morale code and wants to help the orphans and stuff. But all good characters have flaws. Felicity has flaws, yes, but I feel like I fail to portray them well.

Her involuntary PTSD break downs feel like a nuisance at this point, writing a break down at least once per thread... I want to portray the disorder right and don't want her recovering immediately, but remembering the external visible symptoms of her PTSD, the crying and stuff, is really hard and sometimes I feel like it blocks story progression. It's much easier writing her PTSD through the angle of her current actions being controlled by her past, her overprotective and clingy nature towards loved ones, etc. A vast majority of her big character moments these last several years have sadly been her break downs. Instead of being a proactive character, she cries a lot. Pathetic and annoying.

Even then, it's hard to write the negative character traits well. I think I got her anger right in threads like Breaking Down These Lonely Walls, but I fail to portray the anger correctly or even at all at times. Writing her being controlling and nasty in her rage is really hard, since I'm a big softie who shows anger by crying. Writing her desires to be respected and loved translating into her being willing to compromise her own morale code is also something I feel I fail at.

[Black Shadow]

For Shadow, it is pretty obvious that the most difficult part about writing him is communication between characters. With his inability to talk, it makes me think about how he can communicate with others and express his thoughts. Most of the time people get confused by him since he can't directly speak, and that makes threads with him unique, but very challenging to write. I attempted to supplement this by giving him knowledge of sign language, but not many people know how to read sign language.

I personally struggle to write action like in battles. trying to show and not tell his attacks and movements is something I struggle with tremendously. I can write a killer scene, develop great persona and character, but just can't seem to write action well, regardless of characters.

[Storm Veritas]

Storm is tons of fun, and has been through the wringer. It's hard to script stories that aren't predictable because, like all of our characters, we typically lean into accepting plot armor. Sure, they can be hurt / tortured / killed, but there always has to be an out for the character unless we're certain that we're done writing them.

For a character like Storm (as Breaker alluded to with Josh), it's hard to make a plausible hurdle that the reader doesn't immediately presume the protagonist will march over. It's a very "Superman" challenge to force the reader to accept doubt.