A Shortcut to Creating Great Characters 

This was a really helpful video. I watched it twice. Thank you my friend

Thanks for the short and simple template! I have a bad habit of veering off from foundational ideas of who the characters are to "Maybe they did this or this or THIS or this or THIS. Maybe they go on to do this or this or this or THIS" mode of thinking. Which can get in the way of forming a clear picture of who they are and what their role in the story is, and if they're even needed in the first place. Not that I have any finished stories under my belt, but when I do dabble in the creative writing process, I definitely find it a lot easier to imagine characters when I have a name to go on. Even something like "The Courier" or "The Pilot" (a title or profession or moniker) can be enough clay for me to start molding them in my mind. Worse is when I want a certain character in a story, but I can't fathom how they'd logically fit within that world, and my mind starts a tug-of-war over searching for a way to squeeze them in (coherently and cohesively) and scrapping them or majorly reworking them to be essentially a different character. This also has me wondering how you factor in willing suspension of disbelief into your writing process (assuming you do). Any advice for figuring out when to stop explaining things (i.e. relevant rules for how your world works, its current state in the story, why it's changing the way it is, etc) and trust your audience will understand and roll with, versus when to explain things (more) to avoid considerable gaps and holes in the story? You don't want to be condescending or wring your story dry of subtext, but you also don't want to cause the reader confusion (in a manner that takes them out of the story). I'm guessing this is something that's not really answerable and comes from lots of practice reading and writing, and a second nature in discerning such things. But I'd still love to get your thoughts on it.

I appreciate your thoughts, but I am doing well by writing using my instincts.

You need 980K subs, not 980!

u working on any big projects mr morris?

I kind of figured you were filming this from a jail cell. Q❓How in the world did you smuggle in that camera-phone? 😊

For protagonists I would never use a shortcut. For side-characters I usually start with what they contribute to the theme I am going for. Names are neat, but I do not name all my characters, since nameless characters do have their appeal to me as well. But I guess I have very vivid ideas who my characters are even if they have no names. And as an aside, the 21 years of that alien, are those based on the orbit of our planet? Why would an alien care about that? Or how fast is that alien aging? I mean even if those are years based on our solar system, then it still tells me nothing about if that alien might still be considered an infant in it's society, or is almost at the end of their life expectancy. Anthropocentric aliens are something I really hate to read, that always tells me that the author should not write science fiction.

Seek ye out of the book of the LORD, and read. Isaiah 34:16