Read Creating Characters: How to Build Story People for Free Online Page A

where tags are concerned. No Ann, Alice, and Agatha in the same story unless for a reason. No two blue-eyed blondes,no matching Indians, no stutterers in tandem. The object of tags, remember, is to help your reader identify, differentiate, distinguish.
    It’s also important that you decide on each major character’s traits: his or her habitual modes of response and patterns of behavior.
    How you go about attacking this issue is a matter of some disagreement. For example, my late, great colleague in the University of Oklahoma’s Professional Writing program, Walter Campbell, an analyst to the core, insisted that traits be divided into four groups: human, typical, social, and individual.
    In my own view this is mechanical, artificial, and of little practical value. What counts is that you be aware that people do develop distinctive ways of reacting to life’s demands, and that these reaction patterns tend to become habitual.
    To this end, you need to ask yourself how you want a given person to behave in a particular kind of situation. Is Character a worrier, a soft touch, a grouch, a freeloader, a bully? Is she cruel, kindly, pious, a hypocrite, selfish, unselfish, honest, honest only when observed, considerate, unaware?
    So, you decide. Then thrust Character into situations that will give her the opportunity to show the stuff she’s made of before a crisis arises, so your readers won’t be taken aback when Character behaves the way you need her to.
    What about relationship ? Call it the way we interface with others, our associations with and reactions to the people with whom we deal or come in contact.
    Each of those contacts and dealings is different. How do we respond to each of these people? How do we feel about them? And yes, we do feel about them and respond to them, each and every one, even if it’s only in terms of standing up straighter, watching our grammar, or not making an off-color joke.
    For fiction purposes, however, we must consider these relationships a good deal more closely. Those individual connections will determine how our characters act and react, how they respond to things their story associates say and do as your epic progresses.
    Your most useful tool in handling the obviously complex issue of relationship in your stories will be habitual people-watching, coupled with reading both fiction and psychology.
    It also may help you in this area if you’ll bear two principles in mind, each with a proverb out of folk wisdom behind it.
    The first: Like attracts like .
    Second: Opposites attract .
    Now, obviously, neither of these aphorisms is universally true. But they are sound often enough to prove useful when you don’t know how to work through a scene. Is Heroine smitten because she and Hero both are Alabama WASPs and love swimming, tennis, camping, computer graphics, and iris culture? Or is the attraction based on the romantic fascination Hero’s inner city street-tough stance holds for sheltered, small-town Heroine?
    Another point you need to consider is whether to cast a given character to type or against type.
    To put this in down-to-earth form, consider your friend Alex, an individual whom we’ll arbitrarily label with a dominant impression as a scholarly professor .
    In keeping with this label, and helping to translate it into visual terms, we give Alex stooped shoulders, pale face, a frequently furrowed brow, a tendency to long pauses and staring off blankly into space, and a book always in hand.
    In so establishing and describing Alex, we’re taking the approach termed casting “to type.” That is, we’re accepting traditional stereotyping, the kind of patterning that gives us the Irish cop, the dumb blonde, the garrulous oldster.
    “Against type” means rejecting that image in favor of a more fresh and original picture—one that makes the character an individual rather than a stick figure.
    (Which doesn’t mean that characters cast “to type” are necessarily to be avoided.