Character Tutorial - Topics

[whataface2]

If this is not in the right topic I apologize. Because I'm not really sure where it is suppose to go.
I had talked about possibly making a Character tutorial and finally found sometime to work on it. This is what I have so far:

Topics
- Type of Story
- Character's Job
- Look of your Character
- Different Personalities
- Special Characters
- Coming up with personalities
- Climate of the land where your character comes from
- Character outline
-Picking a character model that suites your character's personality
- Alternative expressions: ex sleeping could be daydreaming
- Using special moves to define your character
- Staying true to your character's personality.

Any suggestions?

[Deleted]

This sounds really good and cool!

The only key character component that seems to be missing is motive, although that might already be there but be called something else.

Also, is "character's job" the characters' occupation or their purpose in the story? It might be good to start out by telling the reader to ask themselves, "Why should this character be in the story? What is this character's purpose to the overall story? How does he/she strengthen the theme and/or mood of the story? Or, do his/her interactions with another character draw out traits of that other character?"

(The best example of a character's interactions drawing out traits in another character are Vivi's interactions with Zidane in FF9. Zidane is a thief and a womanizer (both dislikable qualities), but through his interaction with Vivi we see that he's got a soft side: he cares about people close to him and cares about people that are less fortunate than him. This is the best way to use minor characters: to develop main characters by interacting with them. (even though in my example Vivi's also a main character))

Perhaps also starting out with a brief explanation/overview of the key components of a good character (background, motive, strengths, weaknesses, personality, etc.) at the beginning would be good.

It might also be a good idea to separate a character's character and visuals from each other. You could even skip the visual aspect and say something like, "Don't bother describing your character's appearance on paper until you make his/her character model on RPG Maker 2." That's what I did, and I probably avoided a bit of disappointment by doing so.

Regardless, your categories sound good already. These are just suggestions: take them or leave them at your discretion. gl

[whataface2]

Poopiness!
The only key character component that seems to be missing is motive, although that might already be there but be called something else.
Also, is "character's job" the characters' occupation or their purpose in the story?

Thanks. The character's job describes what the character's skills are. The purpose and motive I was going to explain in the Character Outline.