This post is about developing characters and where they can come from.

'Characters are the people in our stories, they build the bare bones because once you have your characters you can start to paint the world around them.'
This is a quote I made up myself, it's true and simple to those who wish to understand it. It's a true quote because your story follows the people, the characters, not the background, so it's important to have your characters first and background second, whether you introduce the background or the characters first is an entirely different argument. The truth is that you follow the characters through the story, you watch them grow and change.

There is, however, a difference between the author and the reader. 'The reader watches, I have to kill the characters.' That is a sentence that Derek Landy said in response to one of the questions I asked when I interviewed him at the Children's Bath Literature Festival on October the 5th. What he meant by this is that when you read a book, you see how they die or get injured, but the author is the one who has to make the hard decision. He/she has to be the one to wound and kill the characters.

Characters come from the strange nooks and crannies in your mind, they can be completely made up on the spot or be planned carefully, but, to me, the best characters are those that have something in common with  somebody in the real world. This is because one, it's fun, two, whatever part of the character is based off the real person seems more realistic.

This is the baseline of Tristan McCall, these are the basic components that make him up as far as the reader can see. The brown overcoat comes from the Tenth Doctor's coat, I loved it and always thought it was rather cool, so I nabbed that idea and handed it to Tristan. The brown overcoat was going to be a temporary thing, but I love the way he wears it so I decided he's going to keep it. The fedora comes from the fact that I own two myself and I thought that I'd continually have character's making bad bald jokes. The trigger-happy element is only seen once so far but that too is a permanent fixture. I need not go on about the rest, although he will definitely start showing off his more charming side.

Diagrams like this are easy to make on things like paint or with paper and pen. You don't have to go into detail, just write down the base elements of a character. I could have added quite a lot more to this diagram but then it would be over crowded and complicated.

Lesson of this whole post is: Basically try to remember every person you meet or at least an interesting quirk because it may help you one day.
Also remember this: You may write the script, but the actors have a tendency to do as they please, the best ones always have an unseemly amount of self will.
(It basically means that character's can sometimes influence YOU as you write what they're doing)