The first step in writing a book is always the inspiration; the book starts with the author becoming inspired to write their book. Once the writer has become inspired to write their story, they generally begin by writing an outline or a rough draft and then they begin to fill in the supporting details to flesh out the book. These supporting details are generally character creation and setting creation. In my article The Three Aspects of Character Creation, I wrote about how the writer needed to create their characters so that they all had a full description of the characters’ appearance, background, and personality. However, that article did not discuss the methods a writer could use to become inspired to create an appearance, background, and personality for their fictional characters.

Video Game Character Creation

Not many writers think of video games as a tool in creating their own unique fictional characters, but with more and more video games allowing for players to truly create and customize their own characters, it has become a feasible option.

Appearance

Video games like Skyrim, Mass Effect, and Dragon Age allow the player to craft their own unique character by altering their character’s physical appearance by choosing hair style, hair color, nose structure, jawline, height, weight, eye color, and body shape. These features would allow for a writer to take the image that they have in their head and make that image come alive in front of them. The writer can then take a picture of their created character and look at it while describing the character’s physical appearance in writing. Actually having a physical representation of the character’s physical appearance has helped many writers to do a better job in describing their character in writing; though in the past it was generally the case that the author sketched out the character themselves.

Background

Some video games even take it a step further and allow the player to play a role in creating their character’s background. Unfortunately, background creation is not as open ended as creating the character’s physical appearance. Instead, the player will either select one of the background options available like in the first Mass Effect game or choose answers to questions asked by a non-player character like in Witcher 3. This method of creating a background for your character is only effective if the writer’s book is going to be somewhat similar to the video game that they are using. In addition, the writer also needs to take care to only take inspiration from their character’s background and not plagiarize the video game.

Personality

Games like Dragon Age truly allow the video game character to create a personality for their character based on how their character responds to different situations. These response options are so diverse that they even allow the player to create an evil character in the video game. However, unlike appearance and background to get personality inspiration from a video game, the writer will actually have to play the game for a decent amount of time, often from start to finish, in order to truly see how their character’s personality would respond to different situations. Again, just like when using video games for creating a background, the writer needs to be careful to only take inspiration from the game and to not steal any part of it for their own book.