Today we moved from looking at world-building to character-building. Starting off the day by reading Ken Liu's "Paper Menagerie", a story about a young boy's struggle with racism and family life, we got into what it takes to make believable, interesting characters who progress the story and make the world believable as a result. As we learned, the best fiction writers know their characters deeply and personally, including many details that never even show up in the story. One trick we learned to help us achieve this and to write realistic characters in general, was to base them off people we knew in real life.
All this we put in to practice in the second half of the day when we created detailed character profiles started from scratch and built up worlds around them, occasionally imagining them in extreme situations to gauge their reactions and get to know them better. This led to a discussion of characters cliches or stereotypes, and how we can break free of them or accept them to improve our writing. All in all, it was a day full of learning, and I think all of us are now equipped with new character building skills.
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