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Originally Posted by judasmartel
Okay, I won't ask what makes a good character, but what advice can you guys tell an aspiring writer like me about writing good characters?
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Read, watch, devour more fiction; note your thinking on why you like a character and hate another, despite sharing many tropes.
Surely you have one romantically incompetent teenage male lead character you like and another you completely despise; one tsundere you like and another you couldn't stand. Ask yourself why. Keep track of the reasons so when you revise your own works you know what to look for. You'll never get a completely objective reason, but then there are people in the world who actually thinks Ayn Rand is a good writer...
It could be something in the characters, in their backgrounds, the circumstances and the plots, their reaction to things, or just the writing -- or in anime, the visual presentation, design and so on.
And of course, try to create "living" characters, characters with their own internal realism (the term is "consistent," but that's often interpreted misleadingly as "never changing" or "never contradictory," whereas mortals are often changing and contradictory). Don't do a Guilty Crown.
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Originally Posted by judasmartel
Do you expect me to write good characters off the bat, because I understand that writing good characters take time.
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Of course not. Many authors went through "the phase" wherein ten years later they'll look at their youthful works, cringe, go hide in a blanket, and try to pretend those things never existed.
But good ones got better with experience.
Caveat: some great ones never got over it.
Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is published in the magazine
The Egoist, and ne'er could one find a better match in terms.
