💁🏻‍♀️ Creating Unique Characters: Preptober & NaNoWriMo 2024

Welcome to Week Two of Preptober.

Oct 01, 2024

Aha, the character week! This week is my second favourite (hehe you’ll learn which is my first favourite soon), and I’m so excited to get into it.

Names

While choosing a character name might not be the first step in your character creation process, it’s one of the most basic (and definitely one of the most important) steps.

So much goes into a name, and as the author of your story, you become like your parents choosing your name (except there’s only one of you so you can make all the decisions).

When you’re choosing a character name, you have a lot of things to consider. How does this name reflect the character’s personality? When I think of the character, does this name fit my visualisation? What does this name mean? Does the meaning work for my character? Do I want to go basic or unique? Could this name be remembered forever as a classic? Why? All these questions are so important, and I recommend thinking of even more as you’re choosing the perfect name for your character.

Ways to find the perfect name:

Look through a baby names database (babynames is my favourite, and fantasynamegenerators is also really good, even if you’re not writing fantasy). You can filter names by origin (Celtic & similar names are amazing for fantasy characters), meaning (it’s always awesome when you can make the meaning of a name correlate with your character—for example, Darth Vader loosely translated from Dutch means Dark Father), gender (sometimes scrolling through a giant list of random names can be inspiring), category (nature names, celebrity names, genre names, etc), popularity throughout time (this is super helpful when looking for historical names), as well as many others.
Talking to people you know. I’m sure you know many people with awesome names, and even if you don’t, it’s really fun and easy to combine boring names into unique and interesting ones. This article talks about combining names, too.
Watching movies/reading books. No, this isn’t plagiarism. There are actually two ways you can do this:
- Pick a name that is not unique or associated to the movie/book (Hermione, Luke, Ransom) and use it as a regular name
- OR: Pick a name that is unique or associated to the movie/book (Anakin; Yoda; Padme; Ethereal; even using both names, like Harry James, Gwen Stacy, etc) and make it part of their personality. For example, the parents of the character named them Legolas because they love Lord of the Rings, but as a young child, Legolas was constantly teased by his peers because Legolas (the LotR character) has long hair. Again, this article talks about ways to do that.
Using the power of your brain. If you didn’t think of this, maybe your brain isn’t up for the challenge of inventing new names. You’ll have to talk to yourself for this one.
Turning words into names. I did this for my MC, Ethereal. Ethereal is not an actual name, but I became so obsessed with the word and it ended up inspiring my MC, I turned it into her name.
Stealing names that were made by the power of your friend’s brain. Sorry, Sparrow! (Context: my friend Sparrow invented the name Rowanus and I stole it. Shhh 🤫) However, make sure you get their permission first (yes I did).

You probably can’t tell, but the creation of character names is one of my most researched topics 🤓

Appearance

For this, the best thing I can recommend is filling out this template.

And that’s really all I have to say here 😂

Personalities

Personality is the #1 thing that’s going to make your reader attached to your character. Yes, my save the cat friends, it also matters what they do, but often what they do is only impactful because of who they are. And personality is…well I don’t need to go on another ramble because if you have common sense you can probably connect the dots. (If you can’t feel totally free to tag me in a comment and I’ll help you out, no judgement.)

Now, how, you’re probably wondering? How do I give my character the personality that will make readers love them so much that they actually care about the journey the character goes on? Well, it may surprise you, but there’s not actually a specific personality type that hooks a reader. It’s relatability. If you relate to a person, it makes you want to get to know them more.

a random physiological info nugget that will help you create relatable characters:
you relate to people by shared weaknesses, not strength.

So, how can you create realistic and relatable characters? I think the secret to that question everyone asks is this: make your characters multi-faceted. None of us real people out here just have one (or even two!) personalities or “sides” to us. And for the people pleasers (like me muehehe) out there, we have a personality for each person we meet!

So two of the biggest ways you can make a character relatable is:

Give shared weaknesses (see above info nugget).
Give multiple sides to every character.

Before you delve too deep into those steps, I highly recommend giving them a personality type, especially if this is a character that is not just like yourself.

Step 1: Take a personality test. I recommend taking one for yourself first, then taking for each of your characters. Really try to get into your character’s head when you’re doing this. My favourite enneagram test, and my favourite MBTI test (take both!). If you like shorter tests, I recommend this MBTI test.

Step 2: Learn everything you can about that personality type. This is part of why I recommend you do enneagram AND MBTI for your characters, so you can see multiple perspectives. But seriously, do all the research.

Step 3: Implement. Here’s where things can get tricky. You have to balance your own personal writing voice and style, while also allowing your unique characters to shine through. While it might be hard, don’t let this scare you! Really try to get into your character’s head, think about what they might be thinking about and why!

Development

Okay, so you have your character. You have the basics. You might even have a little more than basics. But from that point on you need a little bit more. And remember, what you’re doing here is just prepping your character for ~~trauma~~ being written 😇. Everything you do now is helping your future self!

I don’t have a lot to write about this topic, but I highly recommend reading all the links above, and I definitely recommend printing out Reedsy’s character profile template!

Resources

Your Quest: take your MC through every step in this post.

I seriously cannoootttt stress how much I love all of Reedsy’s templates, so if there’s anything you get from this article, please let it be at least that!

Anyways, I’d love to hear about your character cast! Please comment! <33