character development

these are both techniques for creative writing/ character development that i read about in Leo Hartas' books and thought i'd give them a go. they are really useful and well worth trying out if you want to have a go a doing your own characters. anyway, the first one is well straightforward, you just think up keywords to describe what you want your character to be so use can use these words in the second exercise.
in the second exercise you arrange 4 traits or descriptive keywords like they are in corners of a box and in opposite corners its most interesting to try and put traits that are opposite too... like india jones is brave as but opposite that you could have scared of snakes. any way you then use traits that are adjacent to each other to generate other traits that are a mix of both neighboring ones and just repeat until satisfied or exhaust your possibilites. its important to remember not to go over board though because you can overcomplicate you character then it'll be really difficult to communicate what that character is about.

anyway in theory after you do this you should be able to consult the diagrams to work out how you character acts and reacts to any given situation. super cool.