Work and other issues have been leaving me a little burned out lately. It's sometimes hard to be creative when you are just feeling tired, strung out, and nothing seems all that interesting. But I am very interactive with my entertainment...one of the reasons why I don't watch TV and will rarely watch a movie alone. I still like reading books, but I haven't seen a book that's interested me in a while much to my dismay.
I have a confession to make, if there is one thing I would really like to accomplish in my life it would be to publish a novel. I even wrote a full length story once (it's been years now), and I have tons of different character and story concepts that run through my head every day; and I often dream about them at night.
It's not like I have any real chance of publishing anything. I don't practice or write enough, especially nowadays. I still plan on doing it, perhaps when I'm a little older and more wiser and experienced. Still, not a day passes where I don't think, or dream, about some story. A few of them are surprisingly though out.
I have another confession to make. I am a pen-and-paper roleplayer. Even to this day I play D&D, or Shadowrun, or other games with friends. And back when I got drawn into these forms of entertainment, the characters I created were just a collection of stats, items, and powers (if any). A story usually involved something simple--go into a local dungeon and loot it for treasure, or go to a bar and see what unusual hijinks ensued (that was always fun...I once had an Elven Ranger named Calin die within 3 seconds after entering a bar...damned those save-or-die spells!
As I have gotten older, though, my taste in RPGs have evolved from an interest in stats or items, and transformed into an interest in history, background, personality, strengths, flaws, and weaknesses. For example, my first character was a young elf-mage named Natasha (yeah, a Russian Elf...make fun all you want). She was young, by elven standards (around 48), and while extremely attractive she was also quite shy and dressed very frumpy. She was one of 2 characters I created (along with Calin, the Elven Ranger I mentioned above). Why 2? Well in the campaign that I joined most people played 2 characters instead of one mostly because the players preferred it that way (I personally hate that playstyle, go figure).
I don't think I had any real concept behind the character, except she was a elf-tomboy, attractive but went out of her way to hide that. There wasn't very much flavor to the character; and most of it came from the character's attributes, race, and stats (I'd rolled a natural 18 Intelligence, Charisma, and 17 Dexterity...still one of the best set of straight rolls I've ever had). It was a little bit of flavor, really, and something that as I played the character eventually developed into something more.
Even though it was just a simple D&D character, nothing more than a collection of stats, the game I played in allowed me to create an emotional attachment to the character. And with that attachment came a desire to flesh the character out. Why was the character shy? She was a freakin mage who blew people up, often quite creatively? Why did she hide herself? Why was she adventuring in the first place?
When I started asking myself those questions as I played, I naturally started answering them and as I did so I started adding history and background to the character. She gained a last name. A family. Goals, and motivations. And somewhere in the middle of that she ceased being just a collection of stats and became a character. I was fairly young at the time, and the concept was full of cliques, but I was happy with it and still think fondly of the character to this day.
It was from these rollplaying roots that I got interested in telling stories (though I guess it's more true to say that my at-the-time unknown interest in telling and creating stories is why I found RPGs so interesting in the first place). That basic framework allowed me to go beyond the stats and mechanics of an RPG character, and begin to develop a story about something beyond that. And to this day, I usually create characters through the same form of process. First I'll create a basic framework; an occupation, age, etc, and include some arbitrary list of attributes (not necessarily statistics, and then start asking questions. Most of the time I'll have a specific story, or concept in mind for the character and a lot of my questions will relate to that. It is through forumlating, and then answering these questions that most of the characters I have created have taken shape; though they don't really come alive until they are mated with a story.
Of course, a character is more than just a sum of his or her history. People are certainly shaped by their history, even defined by it to a certain extent, but even similiar individuals can react very differently to the same situation; and even their perceptions of those events can be radically different. It all comes down to perspective. The true nature of a character can often be found not in their history, but in the choices they made in life. When creating a character, it's important to realize that and to sieze upon that. It's important not to ask whether this did this or that deed, but why they did it in the first place. To me, it's the WHY that begins to make a character stand out. And it's one of the questions that I always ask and answer. The more of those sorts of questions I can identify, and answer, the more fleshed out the character becomes.
Of course, a character is nothing without a setting to put him (or her) in, but that's a topic for a different post!
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