Hello! My name is Alice, and I’m the well-known star of two books: Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass. I am delighted to have been nominated as your guide today through the Imagination. We characters all have to live somewhere. You might have read about people who live in cities, towns, space, castles or caves, but all of these are inside an endless world: the Imagination. Everyone’s Imagination is different and filled with different characters. And as soon as you read a story, or write a story, all the characters enter your Imagination.
For everyone, the Imagination is located in Planet Brain. And in the middle of Planet Brain is a little adoption centre, where you can come up with your own characters to use in a story, poem, or script. Or you can borrow others, like bittersweet1806 (the writer of this) borrowed me off Lewis Carroll.
Keep creating!
Characters are everything in books; they’re what bring the story to life, in fact. Just imagine a story WITHOUT characters:
It was a cold and windy day. The storm raged on. Villages were destroyed. The End.
Characters are just like people, and they exist somewhere, even before being created. And stories without them would be like bread without butter, tea without milk, cakes without sugar… Nothing can happen without characters to help it along, whether it’s humans, animals, ghosts, vampires or aliens.
Yet people sometimes forget this. I read a lot of book reviews where people hardly mention the characters. And when they do, the book reviewers will just say, ‘I liked Bob because he was funny’ and leave it at that. When reading a book, remember the characters. Some you can relate to, some you hate; some are mad and some you’d love as a best friend. But all of them are unique!
Making characters is very simple. My basic guide is come up with a species, name and appearance first. Then work on the all-important personality. To make your character distinctive, they must have very well-developed characteristics, feelings, likes, dislikes etc. Good examples of this have been in Wonder, Dork Diaries and The Curious Incident Of The Dog In The Night-Time! In Wonder, the main character is fully described, you know everything about him and there aren’t any gaps which you don’t know about, as if you knew him as a person. Some don’t like this, as they prefer to have some things kept mysterious, but personally I love the way that Auggie (and Nikki and Christopher) are fully described, the author giving all the tiniest details to help the reader imagine. For me, well thought-out characters are the most important thing I look for in a story!
Some people would say that characters always exist in the brain, you just have to look for them and develop them by adding more characteristics. But, others say that characters don’t just exist, and you have to spend a lot of time creating them from scratch using your imagination. Personally, I believe that in your brain are all types of characters which you have unconsciously created, and that all you have to do is search through your imagination for the base of a character, and the create the smaller details.
