Last Monday, in our seminar class, we were working with fairytales characters and we received a very interesting proposal: to create a fairytale character. Everything we want, the characteristics we want, the appearance, the powers, the gender or the personality. Our weapon is our imagination and our words.
But maybe, to create a character is not as easy as it seems, we should follow some steps to have clear the idea and to produce a complete character with more than one face and multidimensional instead of creating a simple one.
But, how do we bring a character to life?
- Pick a gender and give it a name. It can be male or female. You can give it a common or an unusual name but remember that the fact that the name isn’t original doesn’t mean it’s boring.
- Choose what your character is going to be. You can find many fantasy creatures in fairytales from ogres to speakers’ objects. Now it’s time for you to pick yours from the different categories: elder, hero, true love, villain, helper, friend, messenger, the girl.
- Select a period of time. The character can be a time traveler or it can live in the Middle Ages, in the future, in other planet, with the Ancient Egypt, in the Roman Empire, at present or in any other time of the history. Watch out! The followings steps have to be connected with the period of time you have chosen.
- Choose a personality. Describe it just with 3 adjectives, the most important ones and after that develop and elaborate the personality more. Remember that you also have to define the age of your character or at least if it is a child, a teenager, an adult or an elder. Normally, the characters that we like the most are those who are not perfect and in consequence those who have a weak spot or a dark side. You can think about its origins and explain why it is like that or why it has a particular nature. It is also important to describe and to explain how it interacts with other characters of the story.
- Give it an appearance. If not the character will be almost nonexistence. You have to describe it physically, the color of the eyes, the hair, the height, the weight, the clothes and any strange or shocking physical characteristic.
- Likes and dislikes. Think about the hobbies and activities of your character, things that it likes to do or not. It can be anything, from physical activities to cultural and intellectual activities. The possibilities are endless.
- Character evolution. Usually every character changes along the story according to the adventures and situations that it has to live. Your character has a determined personality at the beginning of the story but you have to think where and how your character is going to end and what its objective is. Is it a good guy who turns to the bad side or the opposite? Has it a hidden power or trauma that is going to come to light? Is it going to achieve its goal? Many things can happen while you are writing but I recommend you to think how your character is going to end.
Your character can be inspired on you or in other person, can be your antagonist or it can be completely imaginary. Now your character is ready to play in the story and to interact with others!
Thank you very much for reading me and I hope these seven tips can help you in the creations of your own fairytale character.
Hi Lidia!
I like so much your post because you offer us some clues to create our own characters.
In my opinion, we should take into account all of these aspects if we want to create a new character.
But…what about the students? Do you think all these aspects are enough for them?
I think that If we would want the students to create their own character, we should provide them with some language scaffolding. We could give them some adjectives related to appearance and personality, some grammar structures to describe people, animals,etc.
Maybe, another option could be giving them one example of our own character. That way, our students can have a template of the task they have to do.
Once children have their own characters, we should do something with them. What do you think Lidia? Which kind of activities can we carry out?
I purpose some:
– We can collect all of them and carrying the imagination museum (the same that we did with the reading map) and our students can vote for the most amazing one. Furthermore, they can talk in English, of course, with their peers and make them questions about their drawings and creations.
– Another one, could be a little performance: we can organize our students in groups. Then they have to share their characters with their partners and create a little story in which all of them will be involved. That way, we will promote the communication between them, develop their creativity and also we will work on HOTS (High Order Thinking Skills).
In conclusion, working with characters offers a wide range of activities that we can carry out in our classrooms. Furthermore, it gives us the opportunity to work on multiple intelligences and the development of creativity.
Thank you for commenting my post Carol! First of all I would like to say that I wrote this post thinking about how people, in general, can create a character.
Following with your question: how can we do this with children? I have to say that I liked a lot your proposals. I thought that we could also let students make their characters; I mean to create them physically like a sculpture so we could link this activity with arts too.
But what I like the most of writing is the imagination fact, everything can be possible and I think we have to give students some freedom when they are writing, for example a character, to let them express.