Normally mine develop in one of two ways: they either come to me to fill a need in the story, or they are invented at the start of a fresh tale which requires a whole new cast.
In the first case, I generally know what sort of character I need to fill the gap in the story and so I often only have to assign them a name and set them loose. The plotline's requirements shape the rest of the character for itself.
In the second case, I tend to assign a name first and then write up a short back story for them and build them up in far more detail than I would for a character just coming in to fill a gap in the plot.
I can immediately think that character creation can be either person led or event/action led. There may well be more ways.
My own experience (directly from how my stories are generated) is that a person led character is far more difficult.
It can be bad enough for me just coming up with a name that seems acceptable. Working mainly in the near future or present I can at least resolve this by just resorting to picking names out of directories of people - if a surname is needed I just combine first and last names at random.
There is an element that names automatically have associations. "Walter" is (generally) a fairly old name (approximately 1940s - 1950s) while Wayne would be more recent (c. 1980s). There are also national, regional and other trends - such as ethnic and religious/sectarian. If these issues are going to matter in a story it is significant to do some research.
The association game can be played in reverse - a name can be chosen that doesn't automatically make an "obvious" connection... Or you can double bluff and apply a name with associations - but that don't apply to the character (although various people in the plot might assume that they do and react accordingly - with either positive or negative discrimination and/or effects).
So just creating a name is fraught with issues - if we bother to analyse them.
However - creating a character's name does very little more than put a label on the individual... Well - with regard to the individual it does - but there are all the reactions of other people that can come into play...
Let's take an example - a simple one - If we call a character Adolf Hitler a whole pile of associations will instantly attach themselves from every direction - we can play with these in our story... Allowing of course that if we use a name that is too accessible to associations we may at least distract from if not drown out other aspects of our story.
Despite this potential to scream values through a name the name alone does very little to really build a character.
A character needs a list of attributes.
These can be broken into -
physical
mental
social
economic
and lots more - anyone can figure out a massive list.
The question is then - what to do with the list (apart from chuck it away).
Well, "physical" can be broken down into -
height, age, colour of hair, skin tone and all the rest.
"mental" can be intelligence, temperament, sociability etc
'"Social" into class(background, present and aspiration, status and more...
Then all of these things have knock on effects.
A very bright but short blonde might be extremely intelligent, socially active, upwardly mobile and - against the almost automatic assumption - a man...
The trouble that arises if we create a definition of the elements of a character is - how on earth do we get them into the story without reproducing the list - or - interrupting the flow with constant references?
It's all well and good for us as writers to have a clear, prepared, image/list of a character but we need to at the least not tell the reader this information and - much to be preferred - we are better off letting the story build up the reader's own image of what our character is like.
There is of course the (possibly overly maligned) Mills and Boon approach - state flat out what income bracket each character is in, what their car is (by colour if not anything more detailed) how tall they are, which expensive islands they got their suntan from... For a particular kind of writing this is more than adequate... Is it what you want to do? Perhaps more significantly - is it what your intended audience want to read?
So... When we have achieved all that - what is this character going to do?
Okay - I have developed an extreme - only focusing on character as a created person.
I would imagine that most times an author might look to create a character to perform a role within a plot. The detective, the victim, the falsely accused, the perpetrator and so on... Some of whom may be obvious while others produce surprises - or at least twists and turns...
Here we run into the fact that a character can't just be a name with a body - the character needs to be more-or-less suitable for their role...
It is very difficult for a 5foot, six stone girl to strangle a six foot, six, twenty four stone body-builder with her bare hands - obvious - unless you can create some twist or fluke in the plot - but - we are back into the action that we will need to achieve and we are beyond the individual...
So - at last - we come to creating character through the story's action.
This is much more simple.
We need people to carry the story forward - it doesn't matter whether they are elves, city workers, bumble bees or yaks - within the story we are creating we have to have characters to do things to carry it forward...
This is much more helpful - the "what they need to do" creates a whole pile of preconditions for us - and - once we have those - we can play about with them if we want to - we can go from the strangled body-builder through the story that may, or may not, work its way back to explaining how the small girl achieved the deed...
Within that course of actions it is much more simple to build and "leak" into the story the characters of both the character and other people... We can pretty much expect at least one investigator that will jump to conclusions (one way or another) - and that probably provides us with the character who is a counterfoil to this...
and so on...
I am certain that characters can be created within the development of a strict plan for a story - and (as people might have noticed) I don't work that way... (Perfectly good way that it is).
My stories - pretty much - evolve as they grow... And this tends to spawn characters that fill in what is needed in the story.
These are what I mean by "event/action led" characters.
They can (pretty much) just pop up - and disappear just as fast. Sometimes there is a need to pay attention to greater detail about them and, quite often, there is not.
One thing that I do though (as mentioned earlier tonight) in the "how to start a novel" thread is to create personnel files.
I use a set format for these files - it makes it so much easier to dive in, check whether a character is left or right handed and get back to the writing.
Now this is where all that stuff about the elements of a character becomes relevant to how I write...
I don't need to create massive lists or descriptions of the make up of each character - but - I do have a standardised table that includes most of the different sections. When it is relevant to do so I move from a spell of writing to updating these records.
When a new character first appears there will quite likely be very few things to put into the table - maybe country of origin, gender, height, job and little more. I can leave the initial entries at that - but - in order to save myself time and bother later I will often fill out a bunch of other items - married or single, children, eye colour and such - quite often some of these things are pretty much at random...
But - equally often - when a character appears I will pretty immediately have a future progression at least partly in mind. This progression is likely to relate directly to what can happen, what will happen and what the consequences will be... It is much easier to swiftly pop the relevant information into a table than to scrawl copious notes - that would later have to be trawled through to extract the key factors.
So - to create a character - first of all - discover what works for you... do it your way!
Then - keep in mind that a character is only significant within the progression of the plot - and that is from the reader's not the writer's point of view.
The writer may well have a heap of information about the character - but the reader will quite possibly not need to know 90% of it...
Plus - we need to allow the reader to build their own image quite often... This goes back to the issue (much discussed recently) of "show don't tell".
Example - have a character duck to get through a doorway - rather than tell the reader how many centimetres tall she is...
Hope that this helps - if only to cure the insomnia. :-)
Normally mine develop in one of two ways: they either come to me to fill a need in the story, or they are invented at the start of a fresh tale which requires a whole new cast.
In the first case, I generally know what sort of character I need to fill the gap in the story and so I often only have to assign them a name and set them loose. The plotline's requirements shape the rest of the character for itself.
In the second case, I tend to assign a name first and then write up a short back story for them and build them up in far more detail than I would for a character just coming in to fill a gap in the plot.
I have the same method as Andrews, but if your having a hard time you can use a software, I have- Its a name generator, you can get it here
http://kaz.dl.sourceforge.net/project/awesomenamegen/Name%20Generator%201.1.exe
I can immediately think that character creation can be either person led or event/action led. There may well be more ways.
My own experience (directly from how my stories are generated) is that a person led character is far more difficult.
It can be bad enough for me just coming up with a name that seems acceptable. Working mainly in the near future or present I can at least resolve this by just resorting to picking names out of directories of people - if a surname is needed I just combine first and last names at random.
There is an element that names automatically have associations. "Walter" is (generally) a fairly old name (approximately 1940s - 1950s) while Wayne would be more recent (c. 1980s). There are also national, regional and other trends - such as ethnic and religious/sectarian. If these issues are going to matter in a story it is significant to do some research.
The association game can be played in reverse - a name can be chosen that doesn't automatically make an "obvious" connection... Or you can double bluff and apply a name with associations - but that don't apply to the character (although various people in the plot might assume that they do and react accordingly - with either positive or negative discrimination and/or effects).
So just creating a name is fraught with issues - if we bother to analyse them.
However - creating a character's name does very little more than put a label on the individual... Well - with regard to the individual it does - but there are all the reactions of other people that can come into play...
Let's take an example - a simple one - If we call a character Adolf Hitler a whole pile of associations will instantly attach themselves from every direction - we can play with these in our story... Allowing of course that if we use a name that is too accessible to associations we may at least distract from if not drown out other aspects of our story.
Despite this potential to scream values through a name the name alone does very little to really build a character.
A character needs a list of attributes.
These can be broken into -
physical
mental
social
economic
and lots more - anyone can figure out a massive list.
The question is then - what to do with the list (apart from chuck it away).
Well, "physical" can be broken down into -
height, age, colour of hair, skin tone and all the rest.
"mental" can be intelligence, temperament, sociability etc
'"Social" into class(background, present and aspiration, status and more...
Then all of these things have knock on effects.
A very bright but short blonde might be extremely intelligent, socially active, upwardly mobile and - against the almost automatic assumption - a man...
The trouble that arises if we create a definition of the elements of a character is - how on earth do we get them into the story without reproducing the list - or - interrupting the flow with constant references?
It's all well and good for us as writers to have a clear, prepared, image/list of a character but we need to at the least not tell the reader this information and - much to be preferred - we are better off letting the story build up the reader's own image of what our character is like.
There is of course the (possibly overly maligned) Mills and Boon approach - state flat out what income bracket each character is in, what their car is (by colour if not anything more detailed) how tall they are, which expensive islands they got their suntan from... For a particular kind of writing this is more than adequate... Is it what you want to do? Perhaps more significantly - is it what your intended audience want to read?
So... When we have achieved all that - what is this character going to do?
Okay - I have developed an extreme - only focusing on character as a created person.
I would imagine that most times an author might look to create a character to perform a role within a plot. The detective, the victim, the falsely accused, the perpetrator and so on... Some of whom may be obvious while others produce surprises - or at least twists and turns...
Here we run into the fact that a character can't just be a name with a body - the character needs to be more-or-less suitable for their role...
It is very difficult for a 5foot, six stone girl to strangle a six foot, six, twenty four stone body-builder with her bare hands - obvious - unless you can create some twist or fluke in the plot - but - we are back into the action that we will need to achieve and we are beyond the individual...
So - at last - we come to creating character through the story's action.
This is much more simple.
We need people to carry the story forward - it doesn't matter whether they are elves, city workers, bumble bees or yaks - within the story we are creating we have to have characters to do things to carry it forward...
This is much more helpful - the "what they need to do" creates a whole pile of preconditions for us - and - once we have those - we can play about with them if we want to - we can go from the strangled body-builder through the story that may, or may not, work its way back to explaining how the small girl achieved the deed...
Within that course of actions it is much more simple to build and "leak" into the story the characters of both the character and other people... We can pretty much expect at least one investigator that will jump to conclusions (one way or another) - and that probably provides us with the character who is a counterfoil to this...
and so on...
I am certain that characters can be created within the development of a strict plan for a story - and (as people might have noticed) I don't work that way... (Perfectly good way that it is).
My stories - pretty much - evolve as they grow... And this tends to spawn characters that fill in what is needed in the story.
These are what I mean by "event/action led" characters.
They can (pretty much) just pop up - and disappear just as fast. Sometimes there is a need to pay attention to greater detail about them and, quite often, there is not.
One thing that I do though (as mentioned earlier tonight) in the "how to start a novel" thread is to create personnel files.
I use a set format for these files - it makes it so much easier to dive in, check whether a character is left or right handed and get back to the writing.
Now this is where all that stuff about the elements of a character becomes relevant to how I write...
I don't need to create massive lists or descriptions of the make up of each character - but - I do have a standardised table that includes most of the different sections. When it is relevant to do so I move from a spell of writing to updating these records.
When a new character first appears there will quite likely be very few things to put into the table - maybe country of origin, gender, height, job and little more. I can leave the initial entries at that - but - in order to save myself time and bother later I will often fill out a bunch of other items - married or single, children, eye colour and such - quite often some of these things are pretty much at random...
But - equally often - when a character appears I will pretty immediately have a future progression at least partly in mind. This progression is likely to relate directly to what can happen, what will happen and what the consequences will be... It is much easier to swiftly pop the relevant information into a table than to scrawl copious notes - that would later have to be trawled through to extract the key factors.
So - to create a character - first of all - discover what works for you... do it your way!
Then - keep in mind that a character is only significant within the progression of the plot - and that is from the reader's not the writer's point of view.
The writer may well have a heap of information about the character - but the reader will quite possibly not need to know 90% of it...
Plus - we need to allow the reader to build their own image quite often... This goes back to the issue (much discussed recently) of "show don't tell".
Example - have a character duck to get through a doorway - rather than tell the reader how many centimetres tall she is...
Hope that this helps - if only to cure the insomnia. :-)