This craft analysis will provide an overview of characterization.
Characterization is the art of character development. Characterization consists of personality, desire, agenda, and dialogue. This analysis will briefly introduce each of these topics and explain how to use them within the framework of a story.
Character
What is a character?
A character is any entity within a story that possesses a personality.
Building a Character
Characters are revealed by their actions and words, by their agenda and dialogue. Dialogue is self-explanatory, but agenda requires some explanation. A character’s agenda is the set of actions he will take to achieve his desire. An agenda may be simple or extremely complex.
It is important to understand that characters are complex entities. Characters don’t just show up to fill roles in scenes. They have lives outside of the story. They’re doing something before you started writing about them, and they’ll be doing something afterward. They have jobs, relatives, and histories.
Personality
Personality is the combination of behaviors and attributes unique to a character, and it is revealed by desires, agendas, strengths, and faults.
It is essential that characters possess both positive and negative traits. Why are negative traits important? Quite often, negative traits reveal more about a character’s personality than positive traits.
But above all, a character must possess desire. The character’s desire is what drives the character to take the actions he takes in the story.
Free Will
You can invent situations, but you cannot force behaviors or certain decisions from characters. They must act according to their own desires, agendas, and personalities. Permit your characters free will, and they may do things that will surprise even you.
Conclusion
Your characters are the actors who will bring your story to life, so it is important that they are equipped appropriately. To do this you must utilize the essentials of characterization: agenda, desire, personality, and dialogue.