Brandon Sanderson's Description and Viewpoint videos on Youtube were a pleasant surprise as we are invited into a workshop at Jordoncon 2010. (http://www.jordancon.org/)
He showed how to chart out four characters walking through a castle market, highlighting what their interests and plot might be. List four jobs and the sex of each character with an unexpected personality trait that would make them interesting, and follow it with five things they might notice if they walked through a market. Finally, two additional pieces of character plot are added under how to evoke plot. One column would look like this:
Jester/Musician - girl
Unexpected personality - Hates her job
She will notice - sounds, hears laughter and hates it, competitions, marks, and currency
How to evoke plot - she is in debt, love interest who doesn't know she hates her job
These would be put into a table to organize them. I found color coding key items help.
This quick exercise aids in making convincing characters that can be written in such a way by writing about the things they would notice as a means of describing the unexpected personality trait.
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