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The Character Book

2001 Questions To Ask A Fictional Character

For Writers, Actors and Students Writing Term Papers

Joan Meijer

SMASHWORDS EDITION

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PUBLISHED BY:

Joan Meijer on Smashwords

The Character Book

2001 Questions To Ask A Fictional Character

For Writers, Actors and Students Writing Term Papers

ISBN: 978-1-931191-21-0

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What the reviewers say about Joan Meijer as an author

“The first big thing that hit me about this book is a specific talent that Joan

has as a writer that I've rarely seen… I'm stunned at the way that

Joan has taken a mere glimpse at a person and made them someone I cared about.”
~ Literary Litter by Shawn

The Character Book

2001 Questions To Ask A Fictional Character.

For Writers, Actors and Students Writing Term Papers

Chapter 1

“In your choice is your talent.”

— Stella Adler

Initially, I wrote What Car Would Hamlet Drive? because I’m not very good at small talk. I have never been able to think up questions to ask people at parties so they can talk about themselves – which, I’m told, is what women are supposed to do. As a developing novelist, I wanted a list of questions to ask my fictional characters so that I wouldn’t forget anything. I think I secretly hoped I might find a list of questions that I could ask people at those cocktail parties that would make the parties more bearable – but I didn’t – somehow the written and the spoken words never connect in my mind. However, I had a lot of fun making the list, and I found out that I wasn’t at all bad at asking questions in writing.

In the beginning, I used my background as an English Student at the University of Vermont, avid reader in regular life, and an acting student at The Stella Adler Theater Studio, as my definitive guide.

Once the book was finished I began to share it with my friends and family. The first thing I discovered when I did that was that there is nothing definitive about a book on character – seminal perhaps, definitive never. As soon as I thought I had asked every question on the planet, someone to whom I had given the book would come up with another brilliant question that I hadn’t thought of. As soon as I thought I understood everything about character development in the books I was reading, I learned something new and wonderful from another skillful author, play write or screenwriter.

Writing this guide made me acutely aware of the little things that great writers do to develop character. I can never again read a book without being aware of how clever or how pedestrian a writer is, in terms of bringing someone to life on a page, stage or screen. Where once I might have simply enjoyed a story, now I add an awareness of the skill and the technique that is brought to the process. That focus on this skill greatly enhances my appreciation of whatever I am reading or viewing and adds a depth to my own writing that it didn't have before.

Chapter 2 Character Is the Rich Tapestry

That Makes Writing Come Alive.

I don’t usually read more than ten pages of any book that doesn’t immediately grab my attention. Plays and films have about fifteen minutes to justify my having paid money to see them. Establishing character is the essential part of capturing that attention.

Because they don’t stimulate your own imagination, poor characters are easiest to spot in films. Think of some of the really wild action pictures, replete with incredible special effects, exploding cars, amazing gunfights, which have left you yawning in your seat because the heroes are stick figures shooting at minimally interesting villains. Even frightening villains can be very boring if they don’t have quirky depths that take them off the single dimension of pure evil.

Think of special effects films in which the monsters or dragons upstaged the characters to the point where no one really cares if they get eaten or riddled. Think of the sexually explicit moves that are about as titillating as watching grass grow. They leave character out of the mix – (most X rated films leave plot out of the mix too). No matter what area you’re working in, writing, acting or simply reading, really good fiction is all about character.

Good writers report that they sit down before they begin writing their play, movie or novel and develop everything they can think of about the characters that are soon to populate their stories. The may write pages of biography that are never included in the work. Long running television series have notebooks filled with character snippets. Great actors, male and female, can tell you about their characters in minutest detail. This process creates living people before the fact, and sets up the subtle areas of conflict that create depth and interest. Truly great writers have biographies even for minimal characters. You can never tell when a minimal character will come in handy, or when a seemingly minimal character will steal the show.

Chapter 3 Conflict

Conflict is the essence of good writing no matter what genre you’re working in. In the best stories, the hero and the villain want essentially the same thing – control of the same neighborhood, the same space ship, the same golden idol. If they don't want the same thing, there is no conflict, and therefore no story. Running the same questions past the hero, the villain, the allies, the family, even the neighbors, creates opportunities to set up conflicts between these people on every level. God and the Devil want essentially the same thing, though for different reasons and in different ways.

Conflict also enhances stories when couples fight. When people who love each other, and don’t know it, their fighting adds a degree of color to a story that might otherwise be bland. In fact, sometimes the reader or viewer figures out that a couple will end up together because they do battle all the time. True love is much less interesting than the battle field. Conflict is one of the most useful and interesting aspects of character development. The more you have of it, the more interesting the lives of the characters become and the more interesting your story, play or movie will be.

Chapter 4 The Stakes Are a Measure of Your Hero

Conflict and the similarity of goals to those of the hero are particularly important in the development of a strong villain. Your hero will be measured in direct proportion to the threat of your villain, or group of villains. That’s why villains do nasty little things like cut off ears and fingertips. They want you to know that they are really bad and dangerous so that you worry about your hero.

Really great examples of terrific villains can be seen in the Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings series. The heroes would not be anywhere near as wonderful without the fantastic villains they are pitted against and the power and nastiness of the armies of allies that support that villain. Added to this mix is the perceived weakness, smallness, youth and vulnerability of the heroes. It is fun to watch Hercules take on the Man Eating Horses of Diomedes, it might be more fun if Hercules was a teenage boy who had no idea of his strength and had to develop brilliance to complete the task. Growth in character in the face of overwhelming odds is a very compelling proposition.

Many writers pit their heroes against numerous villains, so that as soon as one has been overcome they come up against another – often more threatening – villain or villain-ally. Robin Hood didn’t simply take on King John; he took on King John and his army. The bigger the odds, the greater your hero.

In addition to great odds, the bigger the stake, the greater your hero. In Robin Hood it’s the people that Robin fought for, but the real target was the kingdom – the people were only the vulnerable part of that target. In Harry Potter it’s freedom from domination by the Dark Lord Voldemort for both the muggle and witching worlds. These are big stakes and make the heroes of the story more important than they would otherwise be. If Harry Potter had simply taken on Dudley Dursley, the Harry Potter series might have sufficed as a nice “example” story about how to prevail in the face of a bully and his friends. But Dudley is only the warm up for Harry, he is a training ground for character building that will create the spine needed for Harry to take on more formidable foes. It is the greatness of the enemy, the immensity of the consequence if Harry doesn’t win, that makes Harry Potter a world-class hero.

In addition, your hero can’t be invincible. Even if he’s very strong he has to be vulnerable. The more vulnerable and frightened he is, the more he cares about dogs and children, the more susceptible he is to the whims of the villain who usually doesn’t care about any of those things. Your hero has to prevail despite all of his weaknesses and in spite of all the odds against him. Achilles had his famous heel, because Homer knew that invulnerability does not make a good story. Even the Terminators had their vulnerabilities.

If your main character is close to invulnerable, the people he cares about have to be ultra vulnerable so they can be put at risk. By threatening people and animals a hero cares about, you up the anti for him. In each of the Harry Potter books there is at least one friend in jeopardy that Harry must take care of as well as himself. Every move that Harry makes to thwart Lord Voldemort is complicated by his friendships and his deep and abiding love of other people – that very strong emotion that Lord Voldemort can neither tolerate nor understand but that he exploits with alacrity.

Interesting heroes often change and grow as a result of being forced to fight the villain. Characters who don't have to grow aren't nearly as much fun as those who have to stretch in order to win. A fine example of that is Terminator. How many times did Sarah Connor ask why she had been selected for termination? How many times did she tell you she was a nothing and a nobody? But in the end it was Sarah, by herself, who took on the nearly invincible Terminator, won, and moved on as the mother of the man who would someday save humankind. Sarah Connor was never as interesting again – after Terminator I she was a neurotic, obsessive compulsive, not very sympathetic, dysfunctionally weird mother.

Harry Potter is a boy who describes himself as, “Just Harry,” when he learns that he is a famous wizard. Throughout the seven Harry Potter books he always questions his ability to carry out what he’s set up to achieve.

In The Wizard of Oz, Dorothy, is just a little girl who simply wants to go home when she takes on the Wicked Witch of the West. In her quest, she even manages to surround herself with flawed allies each of whom dreams to possess exactly the quality that is their strongest asset.

Great heroes usually start small and grow. They particularly start small in their own evaluation of themselves. By contrast, people who boast of being big and important, often implode. Back to the Future is a really good example of the imploding bully and the seriously flawed hero who must grow in order to have what he wants.

Like the stakes and the villain, situations and circumstances also impact the hero. In The Secret Garden there are adversaries but no true villains. It is the circumstance of dysfunction, abandonment and neglect that informs the lives of the children in this story. And by lavishing affection on the neglected garden all of them are nurtured and healed in return.

Great kings and great Presidents are made by the depth, breadth and heights of the tribulations that confront them and their ability to rise to the occasion of overcoming those problems. In other circumstances Franklin Roosevelt and Abraham Lincoln might have been just Presidents. It was the circumstances of their times, and their triumph over those events that elevated them to greatness.

Chapter 5 Questions that Lead to Good Character Development

Each writer has a number of ways of conveying character. All of the questions in this book can be evaluated in terms of any or all of these five areas:

1. What does the character do and how does he do it? Doing can be conveyed by mannerisms, choices, absence of choices and the character’s actions under a variety of circumstances.

2. What does the character say about himself? Which can also include what the character thinks about himself.

3. What does the character say or think about other people, things, events, etc.? How does what he thinks and says reflect how he thinks about himself? What is he wrong or right about?

4. What do other people say or think about the character, which may or may not be true? How do the perceptions of other characters conflict with what the character thinks about himself and vice versa? Who’s right?

5. Finally what is the character's environment? How does the character furnish his house? What neighborhood does the character live in and how does he live in it? What car does the character drive? What clothes does he wear?

If you are looking for a marvelous example of how to create a complete world, you need look no further that the Harry Potter series. All of these questions are answered in those books and movies. The author has created a parallel universe that is at once extremely familiar and at the same time strange and mysterious. That dichotomy is forever fascinating.

The worlds created in the Lord of the Rings series is another marvelous example of imagining a complete environment for the reader. That universe is populated by characters with hopes, fears and dreams with which we can identify, but which are strange and mysterious because they are not quite familiar to us. Check out all of the Wizard of Oz books or Peter Pan, Alice in Wonderland or Star Wars or Rudyard Kipling – the classics, whether books, film or theater, are usually classics because the authors are so good at the writer’s craft of creating strong plot, compelling characters and fascinating universes.

Chapter 6 How to Use this Book as a Student

Looking for Term Paper Ideas

Students looking for ideas for term papers can explore any of the questions in this book from a variety angles.

1. Why did the author include any particular character in the story? Very often the main character's family and allies are written into the story precisely to give us information about the main character or the situation in which he finds himself. What that information is, and how the author chose to expose it, is the stuff of good writing.

2. How does any character advance the plot? This is particularly interesting in terms of minor characters. Playwrights, for example, rarely write characters to give their mothers-in-law a job, so minor characters are often as important as major characters and it’s fun to figure out why.

3. What do you think would be a better use of a character? What do you think the writer didn’t see? Do you think there is a character that the writer didn’t include? Who would that character be and how would you include him?

4. If the author was writing today, how would the main character be living (i.e. what car would he drive? What would his house look like and how would it be furnished)? Why would he have made those choices? This area can be particularly interesting in terms of your own personal interests. If, for instance, you are interested in fashion you can examine character choices in terms of what the character would wear today, or you can research what the character would have worn in her own era. Sometimes writers mention what the character wore – historical novels are a good example of that. Historical plays and movies are generally not. An interesting angle on that is how the writer used clothing to advance the plot or our understanding of the character. Same with transportation. We all know Hamlet rode a horse, but what if he lived today, what car would he have chosen – what seat covers? Given he’s a prince and has lots of money, how would he customize his vehicle?

5. If the author was writing today, who would he be writing about and how would he be presenting the character? For instance, if Dickens were writing today, what character would he choose to illustrate a social ill and how would he accomplish it?

6. What did the author leave out in terms of a character or character trait or plot point that you would like to add? For example there are several characters in the Harry Potter series that I wanted to see resolved at the end of the seventh book. You could choose to resolve what happened to Neville Longbottom’s grandmother. What happened to Luna Lovegood? Did George continue with his joke shop without Fred? Since JK Rowling did not supply the answers to these questions, you can make up your own resolves, or you can make up a scene during the Battle for Hogwarts that features Neville and his grandmother perhaps fighting together.

7. What is a character's attitude toward any of the topics in Chapters 13 and 14 and why and how would the author develop that attitude?

Chapter 7 How to Use this Book as an Actor

How much work you want to do as an actor depends on a number of things. How important the role is. How much time you have. Your acting style. How successful you want to be. I’ve known actors who didn’t seem to do any work at all and they were incredible. I have known actors who worked as hard as they could and never broke through to the character. I’ve seen interviews with actors and actresses who did exactly what this book says to do, and I've seen interviews with actors and actresses who couldn't be bothered with this kind of work and seem to climb into the character’s skin anyway.

Whatever your style, it is important to be aware of all the possibilities at your disposal and then to use them as your talent and inclination dictate.

According to Stella Adler, plays should be read several times from several points of view.

1. First reading: Enjoy the play, and get an overall impression of what it's about. At the end of the reading, jot down a brief synopsis of the plot. Not more than one typewritten page double-spaced (250 words). One paragraph should be enough, one sentence is ideal. A “high concept” movie, for instance can generally be summarized in one sentence. “It’s like Hard Hats on an ocean liner.” “It’s about a prostitute who turns out to be a Cinderella.” Usually the big studio movies are high concept and an interesting exercise is to look for the pitch line when you see the movie. “It’s about a stereotypical dumb blond who talks her way into Harvard Law School.”

2. Second reading: Concentrate on why the author put your character in the play.

* Ask how your character advances the plot? Every character advances the plot in some way. Elle Woods’ (Legally Blond) friends exemplified who you thought Elle was. They held the space of completely dumb blonds – even if one of them was brunette.

* With whom does your character contrast or conflict. In the classics, characters often represent whole classes of people, or whole concepts – like the clash of the Industrial and the Agricultural Ages – and these representational characters conflict with one another. You can’t act “The Industrial Age,” but you can act the exploited worker or the exploiting tycoon. As an actor you must choose body language, accent, attitudes and mannerisms that let your audience know at a glance what you represent as well as who you are.

* How does your character support other characters? In some plays a character cannot be fully realized without the support of other characters. The Harry Potter stories have three primary characters – Harry, Hermione and Ron plus a few important friends like Luna, Ginny and Neville. Although at the end of each story Harry very often must act alone, he could not get to where he has to go without his friends.

* Is your minor character pivotal in some way? If yes, how? My favorite example of a pivotal minor character is featured in Mozart’s comic opera Marriage of Figaro. Mozart needed to draw the attention of the audience and advance the plot with the loss of a pin. He wrote a marvelous little aria for one of the members of the chorus so that the moment would definitely not be missed. It was a brilliant piece of theater and a delightful piece of music.

* What are the most important moments for your character and what are some of the choices for hitting those moments? Not every single word your character utters are magnificent, some of them just carry plot. But there are laugh lines, and there is exposition that cannot be missed by the audience, and it’s up to you to underline them without appearing to. There was a story about Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontaine, in which Lunt worked for 200 some odd performances to get a laugh he had always thought should result from a specific line. He knew the laugh was there and worked every night to figure out how to get it. Finally he got it. The story does not go on to tell whether he ever got it again, but he did get it at least once.

3. Third reading: Extract and write down everything the character says about himself. Organize the information under the various categories in Chapters 13 and 14. Use blue ink for this information.

4. Fourth reading: Extract and write down everything other characters say about your character. Using a red color ink organize the information under the various categories in Chapters 13 and 14.

5. Fifth reading: Extract and write down, in green ink, what you think is implied by what the character thinks and does. An excellent exercise is to write the thoughts of the character from which each line is spoken. That is done line-by-line. Include thoughts, reactions and attitudes to other character's lines as well.

Now turn to Chapters 13 and 14. Read through the questions. On the questions for which no answer has been supplied by the author, decide whether the question is relevant to this character. If it is, fill in what you make up about your character in terms of the question. If you don't know what vehicle the person drives, select one that you believe would represent that character's background, class, time period and choices relative to who you think the character is. Improvise scenes about areas that are not directly addressed by the author so that you get a better feel for the character.

Sometimes the things that are left blank are more telling than the things that are filled in. No pets, no plants, no pictures, no knickknacks no children, no wife, no girlfriend describes a sterile life without commitment, or perhaps a tragically disrupted life. No books, magazines, newspapers generally speak to class and education. Constantly tuned in to Fox News speaks to political orientation.

Stella Adler used to say, "In your choice is your talent." Each actor and actress will bring a richness to a character based on their own point of view. Interpretation is what makes people go back to see a play again and again. The magic of the theater is seeing what insights each actor brings to his role. That is true of the legitimate theater and is particularly true of the musical theater where actors not only interpret the actions of the characters they play, but the music of the composer as well.

If your film or play is based on a novel, be sure to look at what the author gave you when using the medium that provided the time and space to fully develop the characters. It’s rare to find a book that isn’t much richer than the movies or plays on which it is based.

In the age of the Television and the Video, films can be seen again and again. The better the job, the better chance of attracting an audience to revisit your work. There are films I revisit monthly. Like a Beethoven Sonata, they set a standard for writing, plot and character development that inspires my own writing.

Chapter 8 How to Use This Book as a Writer

A friend of mine is married to a classical music composer and conductor. During their courtship she asked him what instrument he played. He replied that he played the orchestra. The same is true of the writer. The writer plays every character, every situation, and every nuance. Writing is actually one of the richest experiences in the literary world. I find that I not only play every character, feel every emotion, see every scene, smell every flower, hear all the background noise, I even hear the music, and experience what I'm writing from the point of view of an audience. I am the reader, I hear the reader, I feel the reader. I am constantly amazed at how quiet the room becomes when I stop writing.

Interestingly, most of the classes that I have taken in writing – and I’ve taken a number of them – barely mention character. Structure, structure and structure is the thrust of both the writing class and the books about writing. Yet, good structure without good character limps along like a one legged man. You can't act structure. You can’t act plot. You may not tell a great actor how to act, but you have to make certain to give him the lines and situations that are consistent for the role that he is going to play.

Understanding character avoids one of the great pitfalls of writing, dominating the behavior of the character with the requirements of the plot. I can think of several movies (movies are particularly vulnerable to this problem) in which people behave in ways that make them unbelievable, or worse unsympathetic to the audience, because the writer didn’t understand that sympathetic people would not behave that way. The key to a successful movie, play or book is the suspension of disbelief, and when a character acts out of character, disbelief cannot be suspended.

It is not necessary to put everything you know about a character into a book, play or movie. It is important to think things through. Then, if there is an opportunity to put things in, you have thought about them already. Even if you don’t put them in they color your writing. I remember an instance when I was writing one of my novels that I felt the need to exchange one character for another. It was a minor character but I was amazed at how difficult it was – how much character had to be altered to make one person into another. It’s an excellent exercise if you ever feel like pulling your hair out slowly.

Chapter 9 Sample of How a Question Could Be Developed

Hair Color: Blond (long)

Hair is the same color as the character's mother's hair. She used to watch her mother brush her hair 100 times when sitting on the window seat in the morning. The character washes her hair every day so that it shines like her mothers. Her mother died when she was ten.

- Or -

Hair is the same hair color as the character's mother's hair. His mother used to beat him with that same brush. He kills women with shining blond hair but first he makes them sit by a window in the morning light and brush their hair 100 times with his mother’s brush.

The questions as simply: Color of Hair. The answer can be as simple or as complicated as you wish. Your only limitation in any of this is your imagination and how much time you want to put into developing the character.

Chapter 10 Samples of Questions to Ask Yourself

Some of the questions you can ask yourself when you are considering a topic include:

1. What is the significance of this topic to the development of the plot? How can you use an addiction, a choice of car, the kind of pet a person owns, to advance the plot, the solution to the problem, or the development of a character?

2. From what source was each attitude toward a given question learned (parent, peers, church, teachers, media)? If the attitude is a negative attitude, look at what pay-off the character receives from holding onto a limiting belief or behavior over time? There has to be a payoff particularly if the behavior consistently has negative consequences.

3. How does the character feel about the source of an attitude or belief? How does the attitude toward the source (i.e. parent) of that attitude or belief color the character's behavior? Some attitudes become self-fulfilling prophecies. A thief who believes he's a failure may rob only stores with effective burglar alarms. A businessman whose father told him he would never make it, may attract poor salesmen into an otherwise well run business. The same businessman with a healthy, “I’ll show you!” attitude may create another Apple.

4. How has the character's attitudes changed over time? That's very important. Attitudes harden, sometimes they reverse, sometimes they only appear to reverse. Sometimes the reverse is more significant than the original attitude. Most characters experience some change during the course of the story and it this change that advances the plot. If the character can’t change because he’s already so well developed in his life role, then the characters around him have to change because of his firmness.

5. How does the attitude contrast or conflict with those of:

a. other characters

b. society

c. other belief systems?

This is where the drama comes in. It comes in not only in plot, but also in character. In life, people are often bothered by behavior traits in others. Character traits that bother characters often have a circular nature. A controlling parent often spawns an uncontrolling parent who then spawns a controlling parent. The same holds true with unconditional love. A parent whose love is conditioned on behavior will often have a family that bases its love for that parent on conditions. Circles like that make very interesting writing.

Mirrors are another interesting character trait. Mirrors stem from the statement, “be careful what you hate, usually something you don’t like in the other person reflects something you don’t like about yourself.” Same with love, generally things you love in the other person are things you love about yourself.

1. While contrast is the stuff drama is made of, attitudes that are the same as (a) other characters, (b) society, (c) other belief systems, are tremendously important to writing.

For example, I was raised in post-World War II America, in which the fascists were villanized, I had no idea that fascism (sometimes identified with right wing conservatism) was a well-accepted alternative to communism in the years following World War I. Many people, including people in occupied countries, agreed with, and cooperated with, the Nazis because they feared and reviled the Communists. The resistance, who were the heroes that filled my books, were regarded by many as dangerous radicals, threatening the well being of society as a whole. Everything has a point of view. Good stories are constructed of opposing points of view. Ibsen is a master at this construction.

2. Contrast mannerisms, those that are predictable with those that come from left field make interesting characters. The man who shoots people for a living but takes in stray cats is more interesting than the man who simply murders people. The man who drives in the Indianapolis 500, but has a nervous breakdown teaching his teenage daughter to drive, has more dimension than someone who doesn’t have fears with which an audience can relate.

3. How does the character's perception differ from the reality the reader is lead to see? How did Richard Nixon see Watergate? How did Woodward and Bernstein see Watergate? How did John Dean see Watergate? Each person brings a different perspective to the mix and to the extent you can bring that out, you enhance the ability of the audience to understand the dimensions of a situation.

4. How does the character advance the reader's understanding of the story's theme? Most stories are monothematic. Even the most minor and seemingly unimportant characters play roles that represent parts of the theme until, like a jigsaw puzzle, a whole picture is formed. In a well-constructed plot, each character is like a string of similarly colored puzzle pieces, usually not just one piece.

5. On a separate piece of paper, list two or three physical mannerisms, behaviors, patterns, etc., that either typify the character, so that any time you bring that character back into the story the reader remembers who they are by what they do (scratch their head, push their eye glasses back up on their nose). Figure out how to use that mannerism in relation to many situations. A prime example of that is Hermione Granger’s penchant for looking up the solution to every problem in a book, most often in the library. That’s a consistent mannerism and it plays well thematically through all the Harry Potter books.

Chapter 11 Set up and Pay Off

Most good stories and most good characterizations include the technique called set up and pay off. This is particularly important in comedy and mystery. Comedy tells a joke and gives a punch line – set up and pay off. Mysteries set up a problem and pay off in the solution. Audiences generally don’t like mysteries where the clues are either too obvious or are never presented. The best mysteries are the ones where the clues are presented again and again but they are so subtle that they make sense only in hindsight.

Character, like plot, has set up and pay off. Great books are filled with character pay offs. Using the Fourth Harry Potter book Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, examine the Rita Skeeter character. First is her familiarity, she is a caricature of a reporter, an unscrupulous liar who creates stories that harm people and who asks horrid questions. Second is the play on the concept of bugging, when she turns herself into a beetle in order to gather information where she is not wanted. She appears here and there throughout the story and only at the end, when the brilliant Hermione has caught her, do all the little clues come together and we learn she is an unregistered animagus (a witch who can transform into an insect or animal). This character shows up as part of the twisting and turning of the plot almost from page one, and she pays off almost at the end of the book adding intrigue, depth and breadth to the book that are a specialty of J.K. Rowling who sets up and pays off each character, major or minor, with great skill.

The last Harry Potter book is replete with pay offs that were set up in every single book. Through lines from book one are resolved in Book seven. What makes the Rowling books so interesting is that each chapter is that these seven books are just one giant book with all of the little clues scattered throughout, paid off in the end. And there are no payoffs that weren’t brilliantly set up and, in some cases reset and reset, that aren’t paid off with great satisfaction.

Chapter 12 Reference Sheet

In one area of your three ring binder (or computer breakdown) create reference sheets with the following information for each of the characters. This is an area you want to keep for quick references. You can use it to accumulate more information than I have listed here, but at the very least you want to have this information at hand. Believe it or not, I have sometimes forgotten minor character's names as the writing progresses. If I can forget the character's name, I can certainly forget other important details. Do yourself a favor and keep track of those details so you don't have to rely on memory or go hunting for them in the body of the text. An excellent idea is to make a spreadsheet on Excel with characters across the top and information down the left hand side. That way you can match up similarities very easily. Because it’s easy to insert columns into excel you can create interactive flow charts in Excel.

If you’re looking to turn this into a term paper idea, you can create a small biography for any of the characters in a book you have read. For example, in the Harry Potter books there is a character named Neville Longbottom. In most of the books, Neville is not a huge character, but he is hugely important to the development of the series and has increasing importance as the series unfolds. He is also a great example of why you read the book and don’t simply rely on the movie for your term papers…. The movie uses him as a major source for Harry’s solving how to stay under water for an hour. The book uses a difference character to fill that function. And, Neville Longbottom has a great pay off in the last Harry Potter book.

Creating a biography even for minor characters allows you to create story lines that increase the rich fabric of well written stories. Expand this information by making notes if there is a significance in any of these questions. For example a friend of ours had the phone number of a very famous woman. It was a conversation point for her.

* Character's Name;

* Nick Name:

* Home Address:

* Home Phone:

* Other Addresses:

* Other Phone Numbers:

* Other Addresses:

* Other Phone Numbers:

* Company Name:

* Office Address:

* Office Phone:

* Cell Phone and Type:

* Fax:

* Email Addresses & Significance if any:

* URL and significance if any:

* Profession:

* Title:

* Annual Income:

* Civic Involvement:

* Volunteer Activities:

* Tax Bracket:

* Tax Shelters:

* Perks:

* Spouse or Significant Other:

* Spouse Nick Name:

* Name Each Child:

* Nick Name Each Child:

* Ages Each Child:

* Sexes Each Child:

* Mother's Information:

* Father's Information:

* Brother's Information:

* Sister's Information:

* Other Character's Information:

* Allies Information:

* Villain's Information:

* Villain's Allies Information:

* Points of Interest:

* Points of Conflict:

* Other Points of Interest:

EPUB Ebooks: Free ebook sample of "The Character Book" by Joan Meijer

The Character Book

2001 Questions To Ask A Fictional Character

For Writers, Actors and Students Writing Term Papers

The Character Book

2001 Questions To Ask A Fictional Character

For Writers, Actors and Students Writing Term Papers

The Character Book

2001 Questions To Ask A Fictional Character.

For Writers, Actors and Students Writing Term Papers

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Character Is the Rich Tapestry

That Makes Writing Come Alive.

Chapter 3

Conflict

Chapter 4

The Stakes Are a Measure of Your Hero

Chapter 5

Questions that Lead to Good Character Development

Chapter 6

How to Use this Book as a Student

Looking for Term Paper Ideas

Chapter 7

How to Use this Book as an Actor

Chapter 8

How to Use This Book as a Writer

Chapter 9

Sample of How a Question Could Be Developed

Chapter 10

Samples of Questions to Ask Yourself

Chapter 11

Set up and Pay Off

Chapter 12

Reference Sheet

Chapter 13

Suggested Topics

Achievements

Addictions

Aging

Ambition