The New Generation Writing Society Forum How do you----?

How do you design/create your characters?

Well first lets establish what we already know. Art is how humans show either great beauty or great sadness. In fact it is how we show any sort of strong emotion. Since all of the emotion in art comes from reality, and all art is "outside" of reality we can say that art reflects reality. Of course we know that writing is art, and Since the characters are such an important part of writing we can soundly say that characters should, in some way, reflect reality. 

Depends on the story/book.  Sometimes the character is where the story comes from and other times the characters come from the story.  Sometimes the story line is stronger and then I have to fullfill the story line needs.  The first book I ever created is about a summer camp ran by ex-cons.  They are hired by the families to dispose of the teens.  So I had to create characters that the readers would like but fit into the catagories that greedy or psycho parents would find as a reason to get have them killed off.  So greed for money, embarrassment based on twisted ideals, jealousy, then the other characters fit the bill of juvenile delenquents.  As the story gets to its heightened point and the kids realize what is going on they start to guess the reasons for them being there, one kid wasn't supposed to be there, he had switched places with his brother.  So the characters fit into the story and grew from there.  Then there are the stories where the focus is on the character, and developing that character creates the story.  The character comes alive inside me and the story takes a life of its own as the character developes.  There are times when I hit a certain point and all of a sudden where I was going changed a bit because of my character.