brigitsflame | Thursday Chatter by amri (Reply)

Good Morning Flamelings!

Let’s talk about making your characters flawed.

I’ve mentioned my terrible, undeniable, years-long friendship with writer’s block before. What I didn’t mention is that I actively roleplay in an online video game (MMORPG). I have a steady partner in which we tell each other stories about our characters for a couple of years now. While our particular characters have been established for most of those years, we do occasionally make up new characters to start new adventures with that may last a night or two or they may stick around.

One of the first things I think about is how this character can be flawed. It’s way too easy to make someone perfect especially with video game character creations to be limited and those options to be perfect - unrealistic body types, scandalous clothing/armor, perfect hair, perfect skin and no real way besides imagination to insert anything beyond the ‘norm.’ I have to say that this is the typical case of the video games I play but I have come across where you can have scars, imperfect skin tone and various other little flaws.

Once I find my character flaw, I work around that flaw to build parts of a character but mostly letting my interactions in role playing to help shape the character like life often shapes us.

How do you make your characters flawed or seem more real, less perfect? Does it happen naturally or do you find yourself inserting little character quirks to make them appear more realistic? Do you have ones that you tend to assign to characters over and over in different pieces or are they all individually unique?

Reminders:

Voting deadline for week 2 PBJ is Thursday, February 19th 11:45pm EST (tonight). Show some love to the Flamelings that got inspired.

Submission deadline for the mini contest for week 3 heart-shaped paper is Sunday, February 22nd 11:45pm EST.

Workshops are still ongoing; click the link to find both the dialogue and drabble ones!