Writers Asylum Forum character devlopment

another question thought of in the shower this morning. I guess I should start the shower chronicles thread , and post the questions I come up with while doing so.

When creating your characters for any genre that you do, how much of his/her life and history do you create before going on with your story? Do you know if he/she has ever had the measles, or chicken pocks? have you created a back story for your character knowing exactly where he/she lived all of his/her life?

I used to play D & D myself , and I still play battetech when I can. One of things that we used to do was make a character sheet for the person we were playing as. Which is required to play the game, but the guy running the game also had us come up with a history for our character. Such as what events in his life lead him to this point.

In order to have a good background I think you should include at least the following: where did he grow up at? , who where is friends in high school, are his parents dead, alive,married,or divorced?, is favorite foods, what events in his life significantly changed him, created insecurities, made him evil, made him good.

There are always more things to know about your characters, realize it is not always feasible to sit down and chart out their whole life, but I think it might makes things a little easier on you when writing about your beloved characters

So I thought I would pass that on , for any of you coming up with a main character worthy of having a history. Feel free to add any more ideas for a characters background

Depends on the character for me. I sometimes know very little about them at first, but the more I write and explore them, the more I begin to "discover". I would say it's important to know why and how your character is connected to you story, but maybe not so much every little detail about them.

Really i just make a quick background that I can work on as the story progresses but I usually try and concentrate on their habits and personality. Is this something they would do? If this happened to them how would they react? What ticks them off and what makes them tick? etc.
I actually keep a kind of catalogue file of various characters along with their outlines. When I come up with a story I can look through the catalogue and find who it is that's playing in this new story. Sometimes I even toss a few characters into one when I realize the whole time that they really were the same person. Characters can be just like children, you never know what the hell they're going to do.

well in developing my current character, I made a short list of attributes and as I was writing , I figured out some more about him , which came out of necessity. I had to figure out how to get him trained , and it hit me the grand parents. So I came up with what the grand pa did, and how he affected his life. In the process I figured out I could use this exact same character in another story I came up with a while back , and filed away to write another day. So this definetly makes me happy now.

as to my earlier post which I dont remember, I would like to add this. when coming up with a main character come up with a couple of things your character does, such as his looks , contacts, etc, and come up with the rest of it as the neccessary, but be sure to add it to your character sheet.

All right another random thought I had to get out in my manic glee