Character Organization

Thanks for all your comments on the last post! I was too excited to show you the organizing method, so I'm not going to wait until tomorrow.  :) My friend Sarah gave me this.  (She wrote a book about a blog, but she doesn't have a blog.)

Basically, you just give your characters labels.  A character can be more than one of these, too.  I'll give you the list and then explain the hard ones.

- Protagonist
- Antagonist
- Conscience
- Tempter
- Buddy
- Gamepiece (I added this one)
- Skeptic
- Emotionalistic
- Rationalist


Ok, so you have your basic ones at the top, and then after that is the conscience.  The conscience is like the person who makes the protagonist really think about what he/she's about to do.
The tempter is someone who tempts the protagonist. (duh.)  Sometimes it's the protagonist him/herself. The buddy is the best friend...I'd say that the buddy is usually a static character who doesn't change through the story, but I've seen books which don't have that.  Just an opinion there.
Gamepiece is the person who gets taken advantage of for the profit of the antagonist. (usually)

Here we come to the three that Sarah deems the most interesting.  They are also the three that I found hardest to understand.  The skeptic is the sarcastic person who questions what he/she observes.  The emotionalistic person just jumps right into things without thinking about them.  Goes by the "emotions", get it? :) The rationalist is the person who always has a well-thought out reason for what he/she does.

I'm getting really sick of saying he/she......

Anyway, I'll give you my lists for both stories.

Torn Heart

Protagonist: Jacha
Antagonist: Queen Livia, Lark, Vorrda
Conscience: Mala
Tempter: Jacha
Buddy: Violet
Gamepiece: None...Jacha, sort of....
Skeptic: Kiann
Emotionalistic: Jacha
Rationalist: Oren

New Story (Seaspear)

Protagonist: Ren
Antagonist: Captain Shiloh, SAMA
Conscience: Grailyn
Tempter: Captain Shiloh
Buddy: Grailyn
Gamepiece:  Merriam
Skeptic:  Grailyn
Emotionalistic:  Sahmo
Rationalist:  Grailyn

You can kind of tell which characters are more developed, can't you? :P But really, this is so much fun.  It makes me want to pull out my favorite books and classify all the characters.  So, hop to it, fellow writers! I'd love to hear what character classifications you do for your stories, if you'd like to share.  :)

Love,

Ellyn