Well, here's hoping I don't make an ass of myself.

Everyone always comments about how "lively" my OCs seem to be, and I've been bombarded off and on about how I do it. I thought this was kind of a strange question to ask, but I decided to make a tutorial about character design. It goes pretty deep into it, and sorry if it's a little cheesy toward the end, but sometimes that's what love is.

I would have made this a visual tutorial, but I decided to explain in prose instead for several reasons.
One of the reasons being, if you want to get better at anything, you should be willing to do some reading at one point or another.

I didn't edit it too much... there may be grammatical errors and poor sentence structure, but I wrote it for the information and ideas, not the structure. Sorry if it's long, also. I tend to ramble, as it's the only way I know how to make sure I get all my points across. I probably left some things out that I won't realize until later and end up kicking myself, but oh well.

Please don't critique too harshly, as this is a tutorial, and it's just my personal way of thinking of things. Take it or leave it.

Also, some helpful reading material:
Worlds of Wonder: How to Write Science Fiction and Fantasy" by David Gerrold. Learned a lot about character creation from it.

Hope it's coherent.
Take care.

[[EDIT]]~GArtDesign was kind enough to code this into a better page for me. I probably could have done it myself if I had thought it was worth it, but apparently enough people think it is! Thanks, ~GArtDesign! [[/EDIT]]