Monday, 21 March 2011

Characters: What Made the Greats Great?

Real life characters.

I'm mentioning reality because isn't it the aim of most writers to take great believable characters, even if they can be a little exaggerated, and putting them into neat little plots of our own malicious devising?

The BBC gives a list of resources with a very brief history tied to each name. You may be a learned scholar but I doubt that you'll know every person on this list. For example I didn't know Edward Jenner, pioneer of immunology.

These are the people that have stuck, the ones that are remembered (even if we're not as brushed up as we should be).

From the examples there's a lot of raw material to work with. Take one character and inverse them? Cross them with another? Adjust and tweak and I feel this may be the perfect source for strong characters.

If you have an eye you may pick up on a trend amongst them. It may be all you need for your own infinite source of majestic and long-lasting characters. (Notice that I never said 'good'. Check out Anne Boleyn. I had forgotten the end to her tale.)

Here's the link:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/historic_figures/j.shtml

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