This can be really easy but could also be difficult. Your characters are extremely important in your story.

If you're writing a fan fiction, this isn't as much of a worrisome task, unless you're writing original characters. Even then, depending on which fandom you're writing a fan fic for, you have to keep personality traits and such in mind when writing out your characters. For example, if you're writing a fan fic for One Direction, you have more freedom to change their personality and such. If you're writing a fan fic for Supernatural, you don't have as much freedom because they're already characters on TV and changing them drastically isn't always the greatest.

It's important to figure out your character's personality traits when writing a story. Their personality will be shown through dialogue, narration, actions and so forth. You know how you have to sometimes describe characters from books you read in school? Those authors had to think about how they wanted those characters to act and interact through creating their personality.

Now, I don't know what professional writers typically do when they work on their characters, but there are a few things I may do when I'm coming up with original characters (or even describing existing characters/people for fan fics).

This obviously isn't as big of a deal if it's an existing person or character for fan fiction, but if you want to alter their appearance, keep note of the changes you made so that you don't forget about them. I usually know how I want my character to look, but sometimes I go on the internet and put in the physical features. I do this so I can look for a picture of the character that almost perfectly fits my idea. For example, if the character I was creating was a female and had black hair, pale skin and green eyes, I'd go to Google Images and search up "girl with pale skin, black hair and green eyes" or something along those lines. Sometimes looking up actors/actresses who fit that description helps.

Anyway, I sometimes like to make a little note about how my character looks so that I don't forget. You obviously don't have to do this if you know you'll remember.

When you're first introducing a character, you should make sure to describe what they look like. Even if it's a fan fiction, describing the character's physical appearance makes your writing look better. Plus, if you include original characters in your fan fiction, it's good to know what they look like. If you really want to, you can be vague in describing their appearance. If it's a character that's not important, then you may not need to include their appearance, or at least much detail about it. For example, if you have a character who is at a restaurant and they're talking to a waitress who won't appear for the rest of the novel, their appearance won't matter that much to readers.

I didn't do this for my earlier fics, but for my current story "Dark Side of the Moon", I wrote character descriptions for many characters. I basically wrote a list of character descriptions in a notepad under their name. This is good to do because it will affect your writing. If your character is very angry, you need to show it through narration (whether it be first person, second person or third person), dialogue, actions and yada yada yada. Their personality is a key aspect of the story.

There are two ways you could do this (you can even do both). You can write a character description just using adjectives, or you could write a character bio (which I'm talking about next) that includes their personality traits. Here are some examples of character descriptions using adjectives that I wrote for my story "Dark Side of the Moon".

Camellia - kind, helpful, sympathetic/empathetic, intelligent, curious, brave (towards the end), sort of shy.

Louis - mysterious, kind, short-tempered/hot headed, sometimes violent, dark(?), impulsive.

I kind of do this with the personality description. It's really simple. I just write their age, personality traits, and other stuff, such as where they work (if it's important) and such. Below is the character bio I wrote for Louis, who is one of the main characters in "Dark Side of the Moon".

- Werewolf

- Bitten at age 20, ran away from home shortly after

- Born in England but moved to Canada

- Lives in a cabin deep in the woods

- Unemployed

- Bad at controlling himself on full moons -> locks himself in cage

- Wants to be human again

- 24

*THIS IS A BIT OF A SPOILER FOR ANYONE WHO CHOOSES TO READ DARK SIDE OF THE MOON*

If you have trouble naming your original characters (like I do), just write down a list of names that you like. If you can't think of any, you can always go online and look up names and name generators. If you want to write a last name as well and are struggling, you can also look up last name generators on Google. You usually just put in the first name and the website will randomly pair the name you put in with a last name.

That's all I can think of for now. I know I've been bringing this up a lot, but can you check out my story "Dark Side of the Moon"? It's a Louis Tomlinson fan fic. I've been wanting to write it for like five years and I started it awhile ago but it was bad so I deleted it and started over. I started writing outlines for the chapters and I've written like 31. I'm really excited about this story and I'd love it if you guys could check it out and give me some feedback.