How to Come Up with a Good Character Quickly

Come up with basic statistics for your character. Name, Age, gender and appearance. You'll need this basic information. This should only take about 2-4 minutes.

Decide on their personality. How does this person act? What are they like around friends? What about strangers? Also take note that where your character lives can affect how they act. This should take up to 2-6 minutes, depends on how much you write and how shallow or well developed your character is. If you are writing a story or book that will be relatively long, then you will want to make your character developed and supported. Many people change as they age, if your character isn't going to age in your work of fiction keep the same personality throughout, if they get older, they may become wiser, more cautious, less flamboyant or change in other ways.

Create a back-story. Most characters have a good back-story or a biography. This is optional, but almost every character needs one. This step may take up to 8 minutes, even longer. Sometimes the back-story could essentially change the whole plot of the writing piece that you are writing.

• You can also use a step-by-step guide, HIRSE, to help you.

When done using HIRSE (If you use it) put it all together in order of time.

• H is for Happy moments. What are good memories that your character has experienced/Did?
• I is inspiring memories. What has the character seen/done that has inspired them, or moments that made the character inspire someone else?
• R is for Relationships made. Has your character dated, gotten married or even divorced? You do not have to do this step if your character has never been in a relationship before.
• S is sad, or upsetting moments. Was there a moment where you could feel sorry for your character? No character will be perfect and have a perfectly happy life, so try to come up with at least one moment.
• E is for Extra Moments. Any other moments that are not listed up above go here.

Determine Relationships. Is your character single? Married? Crushing? This should only take one second, or It could take slightly longer if you want to develop a relationship and need a basic personality for the other partner. Beware that during some works of fiction, particularly those popular with teenage girls, many character's relationship status is likely to be in a constant state of flux.

Determine Powers/Weapons. Does your character have any powers, or weapons? Maybe both? This should only take 2-3 minutes. If you would like, you could even draw a picture of your characters weapons/powers in use to be able to envision it better.

Add anything else not mentioned above. Usually you won't have anything else to add, but if you do that's alright as well.