Creating Your Main Character: Special Skills or Superpowers
How to create a main character is the thing I talk least about, here. Mostly because I’ve been writing and teaching writing for a long time now, and I’m very confident that I don’t need to tell most writers know how to do this! Your main character is most likely the element of your story you know the most about. That’s probably because our main characters are always in some way, and usually lots of ways, aspects of ourselves.
I think the most important thing you can do to create a living, breathing main character is to create a space for that character to come to you. It’s kind of a dance where fragments of that person keep popping up for you in random moments, and you pay attention, and whole scenes start coming to you, and you start to hear their voice in your head. Eventually that voice becomes strong enough that it really doesn’t feel like you writing the character any more. It’s more like following that character around and taking notes. And that’s when your book or script comes alive.
However you get to that point is deeply personal to you. And as far as I know, virtually anyone who has ever found my books, classes or blogs is already familiar with how that works.
But there are other crucial aspects to a main character—elements that can make or break your book or script—and that you can deliberately design.
Your Hero/ine’s SPECIAL SKILLS or SUPERPOWERS (read more below)
Their GHOST or WOUND