I’ve always found that the characters in a story play the largest part in my enjoyment of fiction.  The twists and turns of plots, the surprises and the crisis point are absolutely necessary, but they usually are resolved during the story and I end up forgetting them by the end of the book.  The characters, on the other hand, tend to stick in my mind for a long time.  The clearest example of that to me revolves around comic book superheroes.  I couldn’t tell you half of the plots I’ve read over the past, well, a long time, but I certainly remember the names of the characters.  I find the same true for my favorite fiction stories.

The Man of Bronze, Doc Savage.  Conan the Barbarian.  Elric of Melnibone.  Solomon Kane the Puritan.  Paul Atreides.  The list goes on and on and I’m very thankful for having it do just that!  So characters are usually where I concentrate first.  Occasionally the story presents itself to me first, but once I pull together the characters, the story seems to alter to accommodate them rather than the other way around.

So, what’s behind the scenes in creating characters?  For me, it’s the pen and paper role-playing games (RPGs) sourcebooks that help inspire and spark creativity for characterization.  I have a fairly substantial bookshelf filled to overflowing (I need more bookshelves!) with RPG sourcebooks.  I re-read and refer to them frequently. Happily, the field of RPGs is an incredibly fertile one. Now we can add computer-based RPGs and the massively multiplayer online role-playing games to that cornucopia and I don’t see it slowing down any time soon. Those are what taught me that we can all be creative. That we all have stories to tell. Sometimes we can share those tales with like-minded people and they can help us make them even better.

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