How To Create Fictional Characters | Breaking Writer's Block

About this video

Dale, helped by Sequoia, demonstrates using online fictional character and creature generators to break writer’s block, an idea he says he got from watching art YouTuber Ten Hundred. Searching Google for fictional character generators, he tries options for profile, quick and detailed profiles, biography, personality and cause of death, including a ‘fill entire form with random ideas’ feature. Examples generated include a 21-year-old kitchen assistant described repeatedly as dull but stable and giving, with an IQ of about 86 and hobbies including bargain hunting, theatre and recycling; a 13-year-old character; and a character whose likely cause of death is a heart attack at age 76 linked to investigating his ex-girlfriend’s death. A second site offers a character scrambler that recombines familiar concepts, plus appearance descriptions and scrambled archetypes such as a super-smart, super-tough genius adventurer given superhuman powers in a lab accident. He then uses a fictional creature generator, producing the Telhun — a roughly four-foot-tall bipedal creature with a snail head, shark-like jaw and kangaroo legs, with an average lifespan of two weeks — and the Milder, a large hybrid creature about four feet tall with an average lifespan of 148 years. The point is to use the absurd, detailed output as inspiration rather than finished characters.

Key takeaways

• Random fictional character generators can supply names, personalities, backgrounds and quirks to get a stuck fiction writer writing.
• Generators offer different modes — quick profiles, detailed profiles, biography, personality and even cause of death.
• Generated details are prompts to react to and refine, not polished characters to copy unchanged.
• A character scrambler recombines familiar, archetypical concepts to suggest fresh combinations.
• Creature generators can invent full creatures with anatomy, lifespan, diet, temperament and family life, useful especially for speculative and horror fiction.

Episode details: published January 13, 2021 · 13:56 long. Summary written by Self Growth Videos from the episode itself. Business results and any income figures mentioned are Dale L. Roberts’s own claims, shared for education — they are not typical or guaranteed.

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