Find the perfect editor for your next book
Over 1 million authors trust the professionals on Reedsy. Come meet them.
Create a timeline of the significant moments of your character's life. Like many authors, you can use post-it notes or a big whiteboard to visualize your character's life. You can easily move or add events until you feel your character has a well-developed history. After you've finished the timeline, distill it into the top 5-10 moments that have shaped your character. For instance, if loss is a thematically important part of your book, perhaps a significant part of your character's past is when they lost a grandparent as a child.
Feel inspired? Share your story below.
Get your creative juices flowing with these similar writing prompts.
Develop your characters by placing them in a situation where they are faced with a challenge. For conflict inspiration, look no further than these classic moral dilemmas (and, of course, analyze them from the perspective of your character). For an example of a moral dilemma, search "The Trolly Problem."
Choose a character and think of ways they'd react to things that happened during your (the writer's) day. Use your experiences, think how you reacted, and then how your character would have reacted. Possible events: cut off in traffic, caught in the rain, missed an important meeting, lost a valuable item.
Develop a character that's an author. Write a short story from the point of view of that author.
NEW VIDEO COURSE
How to Write a Novel
Your story matters. Unlock your potential with daily video lessons from bestselling ghostwriter Tom Bromley, and finish your first draft in just 3 months.Learn more →
It's impossible not to put some of yourself and your own life into your writing. But when you're writing about characters who you don't share much in common with, it can be tricky to authentically capture their "voice" and point of view. To develop this skill, fill out this character profile and base it on yourself. Then fill out a second one and make it as different from your own as possible.
Describe each day of the week as if it were a person. Give each one personality traits, a job, and a goal. Write a short story about them.
Enter your email or get started with a social account: