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+---- Thread: Guide for Organic Development with a Long-Term Character (/showthread.php?tid=3867)
Guide for Organic Development with a Long-Term Character - vellichor - 07-24-2018
What is this guide for?
This guide is for people who want to maintain a character from childhood to adulthood using primarily organic development. However, you can also find tips for just doing general organic development, as well as just keeping a character from childhood to adulthood as well. The guide can be used for human or animal rp, although it was written with animal rp in mind.
What is organic development?
Organic development is developing a character primarily (or even solely) based on events that happen around them. Rather than creating plots for your character as you go, their major development is based primarily on plots caused by the environment.
How do I create a character with organic development in mind?
Assuming this character is someone you want to keep for the entirety of their lifespan, you’ll want to start with a character that’s physically young. Sometimes people prefer starting at 3-6 months so that speech is already developed and most development will be behavioral. However, my favorite way to play this sort of character is to start them at 0-1 months so that I can develop everything from speech patterns to body language to basic personality traits. Generally I just start with them having the generic personality of a little kid that doesn’t know anything so they can pick up personality traits and habits and interests as I go alone. It’s up to you how much of a blank slate you want this character to be, though, and how much you want to have pre-planned.
How do I develop unique speech patterns and personality traits?
In organic development, the best way to develop speech patterns is to take from the biggest influences that your character interacts with. Who are they speaking to on a regular, constant basis? For example, my character grew up learning Italian, French, and English at around the same time because there were all people around him that spoke it. He ended up with an accent that’s a weird combination of Italian American and Southern because the two people that influenced him the most when he was younger spoke with those accents. Whether or not you choose to do a written accent, you can still have your character pick up on certain types of phrasing or syntax. For example, maybe they have a parent who is very eloquent and so they knows lots of different words and speak often in metaphors, or maybe they have a parent who frequently swears around them and so, even though they’re barely old enough to speak full sentences, they swear frequently.
The personality is very similar to this. However, it’s a little more complicated than speech. For example, they may identify a trait as bad based on their experiences with those individuals and avoid it rather than embrace it. Also, personality is shaped by more than just those around them, it’s also based on experiences with nothing to do those close to them. It can be something as simple as being mortified when they learn prey is actually dead smaller animals so they choose to be a vegetarian to something as major as developing a phobia of the dark and loneliness when they get lost in the woods one night by themselves. While organic development is about the relationships the character establishes, it’s also about finding situations that would naturally occur in their life (or at least occur in most ‘normal’ lives) and learning how they would respond to simple crises and situations.
The basic idea for personality and speech is simply to base it off the other characters that yours constantly has to interact with, as well as simple situations or struggles they’d be confronted with over time.
How do I keep a character for that long?
Muse can fluctuate a lot but I’ve found that organic development actually helps me. There’s constant development that needs to be done or worked towards but you need to know what those goals and milestones are.
I highly recommend setting up a timeline, especially if you choose to do body language and speech development. If you choose to go from birth to adulthood, you should have the first few months set aside specifically for when you want your character to mature in different ways. At what age will they be fluent in their first language? When do you want them to start developing aspirations and goals? What’s their first word? When do they start developing odd habits or collecting strange things? When do they stop? Try to think of anything that a parent would consider a milestone for a young child and try to plan it out.
At some point, though, you will have to bring in new plots. In organic development, most of these will probably be relational. Maybe they find a new friend or enemy or maybe they have their first crush or develop a family-like relationship with someone outside their family. From there, based on their conversations with that character and your conversations with that rper, you create plots that are naturally occuring. Maybe your character has to face rejection when their crush turns them away or maybe they disagree with the parental figure and question their beliefs and thoughts up until that point. The possibilities are endless with these sorts of plots, even if they might seems small in the grand scheme of things. This will be when you get most of your character’s basic traits so these relationships are very important in organic development.
You may want to have some big plots planned out (so they can have some sort of supernatural aspects if you want or maybe some kind of angst regarding their health) but it’s important to remember that plots stay as ‘big picture’ items. Organic development is mostly involved with how you define your character’s personality. It’s about the little moments and the tipping points more than it is about whatever larger plots you choose to create. Personally, in the case of both characters I’ve done this way, I had one plot initially planned for both of them. These plots did affect them greatly but it was important to me that they weren’t so big that they lost a sense of who they were. For anything like that, I wanted it to occur naturally. It’s up to you how much of this you want to do, though.
As time went on and I got a better idea of the characters and what they’d become (and as they grew to become adults, as development tends to slow a little in my experience), I would add plots that would make them stretch those existing traits that organic development had given them. I knew my character was forgiving but were there limits to that? I knew my character was relatively non-violent but would he ever act out violently in emergencies? These were all questions that needed to be asked at some point and so I allowed them into situations that gave me answers. The idea is never to change the character completely but to find their limits and traits and how those might shift with various events.
This is important to keeping a character because if they grow stagnant in development, you’ll get bored playing them. If you ever find yourself hitting a lull, try thinking of something that could either develop a new trait or stretch one that already exists within the character.
The key to not growing bored with organically built characters is that, no matter how small it is, they are always moving in some sort of development and that they never stop, even if they slow down. It’s alright if they become stable with who they are and have a good idea of themselves but make sure that they always have the opportunity to learn more about themselves so that you, as the writer, can also learn more about them (as well as all the people that are reading about this character).
Re: Guide for Organic Development with a Long-Term Character - Orion - 07-25-2018
thank you for the lovely guide!