Sketching Some Real Characters

So step one in my grand plan to reinvent the wheel of my writing process is to create some real-to-life, better than flat characters who have more personality than our little potentially lipstick-wearing friend here in the garden.

So how do I do that?  Well, for starters, I need to look at what sucks about my current characters and the process that I have used.  In the past, I start with some pre-conceived notion of a cool character name, and maybe some physical and mental elements that I think would make the character fun to read, and then I go from there.  The problem with this approach is that all of those "bells and whistles" don't mean much if the character has no motivation.  So, this time around, I need to flip those to the useless items at the end. Holly Lisle has a good description of how and why to leave names and details until last on her site. As such, here's the way I plan to develop my characters (and my character sketch documents to store in Scrivener) from the inside-out.  And I know I write in sort of a "this is why you should do things" manner, but take it with a grain of salt.  I'm trying to convince myself more than anything else.

• Motivating Forces First - The first thing to figure out is what drives my characters, and that means each and every one of them.  Obviously, I don't need to spend as much time figuring out what motivates the hot dog stand worker that my main character buys his lunch from, but even understanding that a little will help me develop speech and behavior patterns for that person even on a minor exchange.  To identify these motivating forces, I will answer two questions - "What does this character want most of all?" and "What does this character fear or want to avoid most of all?" Once I have answered these two questions, the rest of the sketch is all-but-completely optional, and I don't necessarily have to have all of this defined up front.  For my major characters (including both protagonist and antagonist), I need this to help define the major conflicts in the story.  For my hot dog vendor, it may just explain why he is so hostile towards the customers.
• Background and Free-time Info - Now that I know what the character wants, and what they want to avoid, I can round them out a little by sketching up some background/history that will help me define why or how they actually got to their current point.  Again, this probably is less important for minor characters, but still helps.  With my existing characters, I have found that I tend to develop some elaborate backstories but they don't always tie into the conflict or tie into the character's motivations as clearly as they should.  Sometimes I just use backstory for convenience to help get me out of a writing jam instead of truly driving the story, and that's something I need to fix.  Also in this section would be hobbies and stuff that perhaps the character does when she or he is "off camera."  I rarely think about what the characters are doing when they are not on the page, and I think spending a little time going through interests, hobbies, etc. all would help me make allusions to this off-camera activity without bringing it on stage, and give my characters a depth that would possibly help a reader think about the character and wonder what they are doing off stage as well (wondering what Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are up to?).
• Physical Description - Skin, hair, eyes, height, weight, tattoos, etc. etc.  If you have played with my "character creator" spreadsheets and stuff in the past, you know this is how I used to start building characters.  Put in a person, and then define what makes them up.  I think putting this stuff last tells me that it is less important what a person looks like than how they behave.  Sound familiar?  That's right, it is also how we want to teach our kids and ourselves to look at the world.  "So why not carry that over to my fiction?" I ask.  Physical descriptions are not completely worthless, though.  For starters, writing this down for each character helps identify if my demographics are realistic.  Are all of my characters white men in their thirties (like me)?  Is that the real demographic makeup of the Dallas Police Department, the bank branch, the real estate office, the IT shop, the restaurant, the school, or wherever else?  Evaluating the demographics (I hope) will help me add a layer of realism to the story.  In addition, knowing motivations before determining race, hair color, or gender can help me break stereotypical characterizations and challenge the characters to do more.  If I have a caricature female character trying to prove herself in her job to break through a glass ceiling, would it change the nature of the story to make that character a man?  Or if I have an overly assertive male character who gets respected instead of called names, can I create that same situation with a female character?  In both instances, I say yes, and perhaps the characters become slightly less cliche as a result.
• Name - Last and probably least.  Name.  I never really understood people who waited to name their babies until they were born.  I'd think I would be sitting around wondering what to call the baby for quite some time.  However, when it comes to fictitious characters, that makes lots of sense to me - once I know a little bit about them, then it comes time to name them.  And I can either name them to fit with that description (e.g. strong or allegorical names for heroes or heroines), to contradict the description (have a character with a name that most certainly would have gotten them made fun of on the playground, but in this character's life make that never have happened), or to not have anything to do with their persona and just label them (just slapping an Average Joe or Jane name on a secondary character or even a main character - potentially useful in blending villains in with the crowd).

And that's a start.  I'm also open to suggestions, too, on other ways to strengthen my characters, so if you have thoughts, please leave them here.

Cheers!