Character Design

Need

Before you can even start to design a character, you need to establish, well, a need. What is their role in the story? What purpose do they have? You need to get all those things figured out before you start deciding things like what their third favorite color is, and what happened to them three years ago that left a scar on their left thigh. 

I can hear you asking, "But Kenzie, what do you mean by purpose?" 

What I mean is, what are they going to be adding to the story? Are they the main character? The funny, light-hearted, best friend, who always makes jokes at just the right times to relieve tension? Are they the goofy side character, that always gets themselves stuck in bad situations? You have to figure out how they play into the story. 

"But Kenzie," I hear you saying, "What if I don't know what I need them to 'add to the story' yet?" In that case my friend, you probably barely have any idea what your story is even going to be about yet. Now hear me out; I'm not saying that everyone has to do this, or that this is 100% always the best way to do it, but with my experience in writing, it's best, and easiest to plan out all of your story before you plan out your characters. Yes, I do understand that you have to have characters in order to have a story, but if all you know about your story is that a group of friends is going to go on an adventure to save a lost sloth princess from an evil alien king, then you might want to figure that out a bit more first. You've got a good start, but try figuring out more specific things. Like what challenges are they going to face? Is anyone going to have to be killed off? This should lay the ground for more character related questions later on, such as; is there going to be one main hero or a group of them? Do they all believe that they are the heroes, and that they're doing the right thing? And finally, full circle, what role does each character play in the story?

Your whole story revolves around characters, this is true, but you can't make characters without a story. If you try to do that, then you usually end up with a lot of unnecessary characters that have no use being in the story. Ladies and gents, there is no need in adding that cute boy in the story just for you to describe his perfect hair and chiseled abs once, never for him to be seen or mentioned ever again for the rest of the story. Delete him. I don't care how full his lips are, or how blue his eyes are, he has no purpose.

This is when we get into the Chekhov's Gun rule, and you should live by this.  Chekhov's Gun is a principle that states that every element in a story must be necessary, and irrelevant elements should be removed; elements should not appear to make "false promises" by never coming into play. The statement is recorded in letters by several times, with some variation:

-"Remove everything that has no relevance to the story. If you say in the first chapter that there is a rifle hanging on the wall, in the second or third chapter it absolutely must go off. If it's not going to be fired, it shouldn't be hanging there."

-"One must never place a loaded rifle on the stage if it isn't going to go off. It's wrong to make promises you don't mean to keep."

-"If in the first act you have hung a pistol on the wall, then in the following one it should be fired. Otherwise don't put it there."

I know this has kind of been a lot, but I hope that this was helpful to some of you out there. After you complete the outline of your story and figure out all the different roles that you need a character to play, feel free to read on to the next part. 

QUESTIONS TO ASK:

What kind of characters do I need to make my story complete?

How do my characters progress the plot forward?