university

Stress

Posted on by cloudvstheworld

It’s the middle of exam season. Students across the country are busy procrastinating on the internet and worrying about the imminent doom that seems headed their way should they not get their act together; only they’re not.

My university seems incredibly intent on “managing” and “reducing” stress among its students. My university email’s inbox is filled with spam regarding certain talks about how to manage stress and taking time to yourself with very little of anything else. It really solidifies the feeling that, above all, the university doesn’t care about what we’re learning.

I’m 20. This is my second year of university. I do maths, which is, arguably, one of the most difficult subjects to take and, considering that it is almost entirely based on exams, I should be feeling a lot more stressed than I am, at least according to my university. Instead I am feeling relatively confident in my abilities and I find myself capable, if I have had a bad day or if I have done poorly in an exam, to brush myself down and conclude that the dawn will come, regardless of how I have fared in my test. In reality, I also feel that those days are few and far between for me and, all-in-all, my exams have gone pretty well thus far.

I feel that people in my position should also be able to take this stance and should be capable of dealing with stress. In fact, what I want from the university is more talks on the best revision strategies. I just find myself incapable of understanding the mentality of invalids who require two or three different talks or sessions on dealing with stress per week. If they’re like that then they probably shouldn’t be at university, they should be doing something menial that requires no level of responsibility or investment from them whatsoever.

Everyone gets stressed and I understand the need for people to learn how to relax, but I feel that university is trying to hide that fact from people. I feel that this way of thinking has a lot in common with the idea of universities creating “safe spaces” for people. Where people can’t have a civilised debate about things like transgender issues or depression because you don’t want to “trigger” someone. People need to learn to deal with it. Not everything in life with sunshine and flowers, at times everyone will need to deal with people who disagree with them and being able to talk about issues and being able to deal with them while knowing you are in a so-called “safe space” is the best way to prepare.

However, maybe this is me talking from some kind of high horse. I realise that I am good with stress and I realise that I am good with exams, so these sessions aren’t aimed at me. I just feel that, pretending that the main worry about exams is how stressed you will feel is the wrong attitude. Once you finish exams and emerge from the other side, whether they have gone well or poorly, you can take time to yourself then. If you’ve tried your best, or even if you have decided along the way that university is not for you, you can decide how to deal with that afterwards, whether that is celebration, preparing for retakes or just taking a break and doing something menial or fun. How stressed you were, once you have your degree or once you’ve taken the next step in your life, will seem trivial and barely worth mentioning because you know it was in aid of something worthwhile.

I have two exams left. My apologies for the lack of updates recently, I will be able to write more once this week is out of the way.

A Terrible Day That Turned Out Okay

Posted on by cloudvstheworld

I have had a terrible day. Last night, in the early hours of the morning, I was trying to write a blog post about Buzzfeed and why I hate it, focused around an article they ran. I’m not going to post it because it’s one of the worst posts I’ve ever written but I spent a good 90 minutes trying to make it work. I went to bed angry and couldn’t sleep. As a result I didn’t get up early enough to do my assignment in for this afternoon and the knowledge of this plagued me all day, thrusting me into lethargy.

The assignment was a coding assignment. I do maths and statistics and, for some reason, they feel the need to give us an incredibly brief to a number of different mathematical computing programmes without going into any real depth and with a lack of good direction. Then they test us on it and then we forget about the programme.  To top it all off, I find coding incredibly difficult as it is akin to learning another language, something I have struggled with in the past.

I sat down to do the assignment last night at around 5. I’d given myself plenty of time to do it but, lo and behold, the programme I needed to use to do the assignment wouldn’t work on my computer, hence why I went onto campus to do it today. It didn’t matter anyway because, after half an hour of fiddling around, I had done the first part of the first question. There were five questions.

The notes were unclear and annoying, the assignment was hard, I hadn’t slept well and I already was in a terrible mood. The only good thing that had happened up until that point was my walk to campus in the sun. I walk through a park into campus and all the daffodils are in bloom at the moment and some of the trees are just starting to turn green so it somewhat alleviated my mood, if briefly. Walking back from campus after giving up on my assignment, I had the same thing to look forward to.

It was nice but it didn’t completely remove the clouds from around my head until a large dog, I assume a golden retriever, walked next to me on the path. I don’t get on with dogs very well as I was bitten by one as a child but, over the last few years, I have slowly gotten better. It’s owner was waiting off by the road, I assume talking on the phone or something, and the dog was just wandering around. I let it sniff my hand and I stroked it for maybe 15 to 30 seconds.

It was nice. It’s strange to say this but, at university, I feel like there’s a lack of deeper connection. Everyone at uni is just going through the motions and it gets to me sometimes, but that dog cleared all those thoughts away.

I don’t know why and I doubt it will happen again but, for the moment, I feel rather content, despite the dreadful start to the day. I just wanted to share it with someone.

Updates and plans for this blog (My music)

Posted on by cloudvstheworld

I have been incredibly underactive on this blog lately. It’s getting to exam period and I started revising a couple of weeks ago so it’s not entirely unreasonable. On top of that I have spent a lot of my time playing music when I am free and in a creative mood rather than writing articles. However, over the coming couple of months I will still try to post as much as I can, though I still have no official upload schedule and it will most likely be just as ideas come to me. That said, I have 12 drafts of articles waiting for me according to WordPress. I’ll get round to finishing them… sometime.

I mentioned music though which is something I wanted to talk about specifically. In the New Year I made a promise to myself to really go for it with my guitar and singing this year and, thus far, I’ve been doing pretty well with that. I have played a couple of acoustic shows (hence the picture) where I performed a mix of covers and originals, and I have more lined up for the summer. I have written a couple of songs that I am happy with and have an album’s worth of lines and riffs to sort through at a later date. It’s plugging along quite well and as soon as I set up a page/blog/soundcloud dedicated to it I will post it here so people can check it out.

I am also in the process of setting up a band but nothing will come of it as of yet. Our bassist needs to buy a bass guitar, our drummer needs to get his proper drums from home and bring them to uni and, on top of that, he needs to get into university next year, something which he is convincing me he is incapable of. We also need a name (Knife The King or First Against The Wall are my favourites at the moment) but we still have a long time to come up with one.

In terms of Dota, I have only recently had time to start playing again. I have been incredibly rusty but I have managed to shake that off. I was also getting disheartened by All Pick and Ranked so I am sticking to Single Draft now and enjoying it a lot more. In terms of the proscene, I still follow it rather closely but I watch significantly less now than I used to. I mainly put this down to Virtus.Pro’s performance being absolute wank over the last few months since The Summit 4 and a distinct lack of tournaments that interest me.

I enjoyed Captain’s Draft but VP and Vega were the only teams that really interested me and I was so disheartened by VP’s performance at the start that I didn’t watch much after they got eliminated. I also find this meta incredibly dull to watch, though I have been told that the second half of the Shanghai Major was very entertaining. I have a post about The Shanghai Major in the works but I will let it be known now that my views on it are not positive. I didn’t like the format, I’m bitter because I missed the predictions on the Compendium because I was in another country, the casting was stale and I think the drama became more important than the Dota.

Anything else to talk about? I got nominated for the Blogger Recognition Award which was pretty cool, I guess. I mean, I think it’s basically akin to a chain-letter but I got nominated by The Grae Area which was good at least because I do enjoy her Dota 2 related work. However, I won’t be doing my own nominations. Frankly, when I try and look for blogs to follow that I might like I find myself severely underwhelmed.

At least half of them that I see are just exhibits of people’s short-form fiction, which I have no problem with but almost all of them are terrible. I will say no more than that because I think it’s another post and it might get a bit ranty. A number of others are just links to YouTube videos or short, one-paragraph posters. So only about 5% of the blogs on this site have even a chance of interesting me. That’s the nature of user-created content though, I just wish WordPress had better filters so I could hone in on that 5%.

In summary, everything’s a bit hectic but I’m having a lovely time. Music is coming along, this blog is falling behind, Dota 2 is a sin-wave and uni is alright… I wish I had more time so that I could do everything because I am incredibly busy at the moment but I’m enjoying myself at least.

Do whatever the fuck you want!

Posted on by cloudvstheworld

As I was scrolling through the “Discover” section on WordPress I saw this article and thought that the bluff it pulled amused me. It’s a piece titled “Twelve habits of happy, healthy people who don’t give a shit about your inner peace,” and then, instead of being the clickbait that I expected yet couldn’t help myself from checking out, it made a point about how every advice article like that is eerily similar and equally useless.

Succinctly, but in far more artsy words, the articles all tell you to do whatever the fuck you want.

In a time when many are trying to better themselves by making resolutions that often set unrealistic goals to impress people who don’t need to be impressed, I think that’s quite good advice. The truth is that, if you’re not a fucking idiot about it, you can do whatever the fuck you want.

An easy example from my life would be energy drinks. I like energy drinks but I drink them only very rarely. If I drank them frequently then I’d probably get fat and get diabetes unless I changed parts of my lifestyle. I drink them in moderation, which is how I treat everything in life. Of course, as human beings, we are wont to binge but, if you’re not an idiot about it and you can control yourself regardless of what it is you’re going to binge on, you can try and enjoy most things that are considered “bad for you,” without too many consequences.

As always there is a thin line between moderating your own behaviour and enabling it. The most dangerous lies we tell are the ones we tell ourselves. Another example from my life is how my weight has changed since Christmas. I weighed myself when I went home for Christmas and didn’t weigh myself again until I was visiting a friend this weekend. My house doesn’t have a set of bathroom scales and so it shocked me slightly to find that I had put on a stone in weight in two months. I wouldn’t call my lifestyle “active,” but I walk or cycle to and from lectures/town/the supermarket/literally everywhere I go because I can’t drive and never take public transport because of money. That didn’t change at all, but I did start eating more junk food because of the amount of work I accrued last term. I’ve changed now because I realise how unhealthy my lifestyle was becoming, but for two months I had been lying to myself by pretending that, because I went everywhere under my own steam, it wasn’t affecting me much, if at all.

Concluding remarks feel somewhat arbitrary in an article like this. When something is literally titled “do whatever the fuck you want,” it seems strange to give my own thoughts as a final remark. I’ll simply reiterate how much I believe in the mantra “everything in moderation.”

Attack on Jargon

Posted on by cloudvstheworld

Jargon is what people use to make themselves seem intelligent. The definition, according to the Oxford Online Dictionary, is “special words or phrases used by a profession or group that are difficult for others to understand.” However, as is often wont to happen, the word is evolving and will hopefully soon be redefined.

I believe that, once, jargon did refer to words used by particular professions. To take on from my own field, you wouldn’t hear many non-statisticians talking about “variance” and “multiple comparison tests,” however, while these words are in my notes for some lectures, far more frequent is the meaningless babble that comes lecturers.

I want to copy and paste a definition of what Pi-Theory is from my course notes and then I am going to tell you what it is from my own research. From the textbook:

Pi-Theorem: a mathematical relationship between some dimensional physical quantities or governing parameters of the problem can be written as a relationship between a group of non-dimensional parameters from the group of dimensional governing parameters; the number of non-dimensional products is equal to the total number of dimensional parameters subtracting the number of governing parameters with independent dimensions.

 

Now my own:

Pi- Theorem: If you have a number of variables that are linked, for example a number of measurements of time, mass and/or length, then you can rewrite them into a set. No answers will change as long as you change each physical variable, for example, mass, by the same amount.

 

Now, my answer begs a bit of understanding of the maths we are currently working on to be implemented, but I’m willing to bet quite a large amount of money that you understood my answer much more clearly than that of the textbook. This wouldn’t irritate me if the reason for it wasn’t so asinine:

Professionals are insecure about their intelligence.

There is no reason to make your texts complicated to understand. I am already dealing with university-level maths, it’s difficult enough without my professor having to parade his IQ around like he’s trying to attract a mate. If you look back at the textbook example then you will find that it is all one sentence. You will also find that the same words, and the antonyms of said words, are used an obscene amount of times, leading to a great deal of confusion and misunderstanding. I don’t think it makes him seem smart. I think it makes him look like a bad professor.

I remember reading a number of excerpts from historians in my A-level maths coursework. These were people famed for their work on certain topics of history and well-known as masters of their respective fields, but it doesn’t matter one jot to me because their work is nigh-on incomprehensible. You have to read a page at least four times to understand it and what has taken the author 300 words could have taken 100. It’s bad writing and simply makes knowledge feel unobtainable.

I feel this is why Bill Nye and Neil DeGrasse Tyson are so revered by a number of people. They don’t patronise you when teaching you and they don’t show off even though you know that an awful lot of knowledge is stored betwixt their ears. I’m perfectly aware that people are better at different things and that not everyone is as smart as everyone else, but I know I’m capable of understanding Pi-Theory, and a number of other things, but I have been rebuffed by obtuse professionals adding words where they aren’t needed and then some longer words to make sure you know they’re smart.

As a side note, I deliberately tried to make the article a bit difficult to read. I’m flexing my verbal muscles and showing my verbosity, in part, to show off, but, mostly, to give an example of how people can exclude others from their work even if their message is good.

Say hello to the future of your worthless degree!

Posted on by cloudvstheworld

I do a maths degree. Arguably maths is one of the most respected degrees. It’s intense, difficult, confusing and, at times, borderline insane and, because of this, people treat it as a gateway into any job they want, once they have it of course. They don’t actually realise that degrees are only as good as the person holding them, so, in reality, what’s the point of having a degree if they’re only as good as you are?

I saw this article on the BBC yesterday and I wondered about what it could mean. Not only does it talk about Penguin removing the necessity for job applicants to have a degree, but also about a number of other companies including Deloitte, PricewaterhouseCoopers and Ernst and Young, who have all taken steps to do the same and have moved their recruitment criteria away from taking people based on grades towards taking them on based on how they are as a person. It’s fascinating to think about.

There are so many possible reasons for this, and I really want to talk about them because, ever since I start my degree, I have had to ask myself why anyone needs/wants/thinks that a maths degree is useful. I’ll get back to that later but first I must talk about the article.

I think that these moves show a lack of faith in the education system as a whole. The number of people getting degrees has substantially increased over the last 20 to 30 years to the point where around 40% of the UK populace has a degree. This has basically created a wholly unexpected problem of people being overqualified for jobs during the recession. People with first-class degrees are applying for jobs in Starbucks. Most minimum wage jobs now get over 100 applicants, many of them with degrees fresh out of university. It’s bizarre but, more importantly, it challenges the idea that a degree guarantees you a job.

When people with degrees get rejected for jobs in favour of people without, you have to really ask what they are worth? “They”, in that sentence, refers to both the degrees and the people holding them. Whether they are maths degrees, English degrees or one of the more stupid degrees like Sociology or Philosophy or Musicology, people are starting to see them for what they are: pieces of paper that say you fulfilled some arbitrary criteria. They’re hard criteria to fulfill in a lot of cases but they are a simple set of hoops to jump through nonetheless. Again I bring up my pet peeve as well but if you have a degree in something like creative writing then I think you seriously need to take a look at what you want to do with yourself, because it isn’t anything to do with writing, creatively or otherwise. If you wanted to be a writer or a musician or something like that then you’d be doing it already, like I am.

But I’m getting off topic. I read a quote a few days ago that read “Children cheat because society values grades more than learning.” Finally that seems to be changing. With this move, a few companies, which hopefully grows to many, have said that they want talented people without degrees rather than talentless people with them. It’s like when people state things like “Bill Gates doesn’t have a degree,” and things like that to show that you can be successful without one. I personally don’t like this interpretation. When I think of Bill Gates I think of an incredibly smart, talented man who has a drive and ambition like no one else in the world.

I think that you should look at people for what they have got, rather than what they haven’t. Unfortunately that brings to mind, for many, only materialism, which is how we measure our worth in capitalism, but if we look past that, like these companies now are, then we can start to see what value people have, and what value they can have to us. These companies have stopped going “this person doesn’t have a degree, therefore they can’t work here,” and have moved on. It echoes so many of my thoughts over the past ten years. I’m here at university because society says I need to have a degree to get the kind of jobs I want, despite me knowing that I don’t. My degree is going to pay the bills until I can do what I want for a living, which, in case you hadn’t guessed, is writing. Finally this type of thinking is changing and, while I think it will take another 20 to 30 years to get back to how it should be; where university is an option and not an expectation, I revel in seeing it change.

Something, something, EXAMS!

Posted on by cloudvstheworld

I’m revising for an exam which I have tomorrow at the moment but, if I leave it another day, this blog won’t have been updated in 2 days and I would prefer to not have that happen.

I saw a quote the other day that said “students cheat because society values grades more than learning,” and there’s something about that which rings true to me. I’m at university because society values a person with a degree more highly than someone without, despite the fact that I am not going to be any more capable of doing the jobs generally associated with a maths degree at the end of this (accountant, banker or programming) There’s a miserable irony there which I try not to think about.

Racism at Oxford – A response

Posted on by cloudvstheworld

I just finished reading this article by a history student at Oxford. It was an interesting and impassioned read, but I couldn’t help but feel that, in talking about how people were missing the point of the campaign to remove a statue of Cecil Rhodes, she herself has missed her own point.

First of all I want to answer the question of is Oxford University racist? I’m going to go out on a limb and answer no. Can I prove this? Well, not entirely, but can I offer some insight as to why I think this? Definitely.

The author’s accusation of how Oxford, as an institution, is racist revolves around two key pieces of evidence, 1. only 4% of professors are non-white and 2. her own personal experience of a student singing an extract of the lion king to him in his 3rd week of term there. For number 1. I remind people that correlation does not imply causation and secondly, the percentage of students at Oxford that were non-white in 2010 was 12.2%, which is almost exactly the same as the percentage of the UK population that was non-white in the 2011 census, which is 12.9%. The percentage of the population that is non-white has also grown considerably since the 2001 census, when is was only 7.9%. Assuming the rate of growth was constant then the percentage in 2010 was 12.4%, even more in line with the proportion of non-white students. If you look back to 2001 then the percentage of students at Oxford who were non-white was, previously, slightly higher than the 2001 census figure with 11.7% of the student body being non-white.

Her claim of only 4% of the professors being black is also misleading as not only is only 3% of the UK population black but, nationally, between 15% and 16% of professors are non-white and, overall, around 20% of faculty members are non-white. Unfortunately I could find no Oxford-specific data but, since Oxford and Cambridge are the national leaders in terms of education, I doubt they vary too much.

However, something interesting comes about from looking further at these statistics as the success rate for white students is slightly higher. The disparity between the two is huge, however, I think there are probably a number of reasons for this. Firstly, a small difference in success rate can definitely be attributed to whether a student is foreign or not. If we look at this data for 2014 we can see that 36.25% of the students at Oxford come from outside of the UK. I do make the assumption that there is a significantly higher ratio of non-white students to white students in foreign students, which I think is reasonable, and we must assume that the percentage of non-whites in the UK-students hovers around at least 10% to concur with the census data and the data of student diversity we have already stated. With being a foreign student comes a number of difficulties for the student: fitting into a new culture, the stress of leaving home to move to a different country, language barriers, and a number of other, small problems they have to overcome. It’s also worth saying that the success rate has been declining for everyone since the records began in 1995. The pressure Oxford must place on its students must be insane for there to be only a lower than 25% success rate!

To address his second piece of proof; one racist comment from a drunk student does not make an institution racist. Are there racist students attending Oxford? Certainly. I’m sure there’s some moron in the 22,000 students they have that supports Britain First or the BNP. Am I also certain that, if we talk about off-cuff comments at demographics, we have all made a joke at the expense of some group. I know, as a pasty, white nerd who does maths and plays video games, that I have had a number of jokes made at my expense in the past. Does this make it acceptable? Not in the slightest. Does it make Oxford racist? Still a no in my book I’m afraid.

Finally I can address his actual point about how students campaigning to remove a statue of Cecil Rhodes, whom, whether you like it or not, is a figure with extremely important historical significance, as the student in question should know, have somehow “missed the point” of their protest. I ask him a simple question in response: what does he propose instead? I think that, in order to be successful, a protest must know what its end goals and final aims are. It’s why the “Occupy Movement,” has achieved basically nothing. This protest has got people talking about racism in Oxford. This protest has gotten students at Oxford to think about racist attitudes and how they have affected the university, and how they affect the university now. I agree with him that the protest is centred around racism from 150-years and fails to acknowledge that there are racist students in Oxford right now, however, now will come the follow up, and he can head it up.

My advice to him is to stage another event like this from 2014. The event in question was called the “I, too, am Oxford,” campaign and featured a number of students holding up placards of racist experiences they have had at the university. Looking through the pictures is very interesting. It proves that a number of people at the university make assumptions when they see someone who isn’t white. It also got a lot of people talking and has prompted people at Oxford to think about racist attitudes, much like this protest has. Some of the comments are far more offensive than others and some seem to be comments taken the wrong way. “What made you put your hair like that?” seems, to me at least, an example of the latter and “Even if I was religious, Muslim Land is not a place I can swim back to,” an example of the former. In fact, if we look at this then it seems like an awful lot of the students are racist and, if the author truly believes that Oxford is racist then she should definitely want to do something about it and, since she has already got the achievement of getting into the most prestigious university in the world, she should certainly feel able to at least make a difference. I should hope this is the aim of the article but, from what I’ve managed to cobble together in a couple of hours, it feels like her article is vacuously under-researched.

Writing Believable Characters – Visual Design

Posted on by cloudvstheworld

Following on from my post yesterday, this section on character creation looks at how I like to think about characterisation. It’s not just about what the character wears or what colour their hair is, but about how they react to the environment you place them in, and how they make their personal space their own.

Before diving in, really think about what’s important to your characters. If we’re just looking at modern books, is it important for a character to fit in with a crowd or be individual? Do they like music? Do they like the way they look? I think it’s especially fun to play around with this if they have a uniform as how they wear it can convey a lot more about their character rather than just what they choose to wear. You just have to look at a group of school children to see, to an extent, their personalities. Are all their shirts tucked in? Do they wear anything besides their uniforms like scarves or gloves? Do they wear their jacket or have they swapped it out for a hoodie as soon as they get out the school gates? Of course, this isn’t just at school where people are forced to dress a certain way. If your character has to go to some fancy ball then what are they going to wear and are they happy to wear it or would they rather be at home in a dressing gown?

But now we’re getting off track and, to be honest, the clothes people wear are the low hanging fruit. What does your character surround themselves with? There’s a section in Looking For Alaska where the two protagonists break into a bunch of other student’s rooms to have a look at what it’s like and to find out what makes these people tick. It can be something really simple that can be overlooked or it can be very in your face and obvious. Staying with Alaska as an example, we find that one pair of boys have very expensive hair products that they’re left at their boarding school while they are back home. Why is this? asks Alaska. Because they have the same products at home. Their appearance is so important to the them that they have bought repeat products so that they will never be without them. It’s something that can easily be overlooked but, with a bit of thought, can be worked through. Then there are, of course, the more obvious things, like Alaska’s room being filled with books.

The unfortunate thing is that being subtle is difficult and might go unappreciated while being obvious can make it feel like you are hammering the point home a little too forcefully to your audience, which is, again, why it is important to know your characters. If they are trying to be larger-than-life then obvious is the way to go, or if they are really passionate about one particular thing then obvious will do for that but you may have to restrain yourself otherwise.

Of course, it’s not just about what your character likes as well, but you can reflect their background in what they wear and their surroundings. An easy example is, if they’re rich, the stuff they surround themselves with will likely reflect that.

You can do an awful lot with visuals alone, even in a book. People will take your ideas and description and mold them into someone they imagine but your basis will always be the most important thing for them. No one will read the same book the exact same way as other people, least of all the writer, which is why it’s so important to keep visuals in mind when writing your characters.

Writing Believable Characters – The past and future self

Posted on by cloudvstheworld

Many people struggle to write believable characters. It’s a difficult skill to master and, if I’m honest, I don’t think many writers have totally grasped it, even those who write best-sellers. Hopefully, through this series, I’ll be able to help a bit with how you create and design your characters.

The most important thing to keep in mind when writing a character is what purpose do you want them to fulfil? I’m not talking about how The Boy in The Road represents hope of how every character in Of Mice and Men represents The American Dream, I’m just talking about what journey your character is going on.

Let’s use an easy example. Frodo from The Lord of The Rings. His goal is to destroy the One Ring in Mt. Doom. That is where he is going, so he dresses and prepares himself the only way he really knows, which is a result of his past. He’s led a comfortable life but one that, by Hobbit standards, is willfully adventurous in a very romanticised way. As a result, when he learns how powerful the One Ring is and how important his journey is he tries to get out of it.

From this information you start to get an idea of how Frodo will look and act. He doesn’t take a weapon with him because he’s never needed to fight. He’s travelling with his friend and so is relaxed. He’s got his rucksack with the pots and pans on and, frankly, he pervades an air of naivety for a good while, which makes sense when you consider his past.

That’s what you have to do. If your character’s parents used to fight all the time then it makes sense to make them slow to trust and and wary of relationships. If their dream is to become a writer (yes, I am going for the low-hanging fruit with that one) then you have to reflect that. Make their room into something resembling a library. Have them, at points, prattle on about something they read or wrote. Don’t just have them do the generic things you want them to because all that results in is a character that drifts through a story that isn’t theirs.

I’ll talk about the process of designing my most recent protagonist. He wants to create a band where he is the lead guitarist. He was homeless for a year after his parents died. Therein you have the basics of his future and past. To add some spice to the character I have made him obsessed with dead rockstars.

As a result of all of this he is moody and untrusting. He constantly has his iPod with him and his guitar and amp are the most prominent things in his room. He wears t-shirts advertising bands like Nirvana. He doesn’t take work seriously unless it is him writing music. Finally, like all rockstars, which is something he obviously aspires to be, he likes partying a little too much to the point where it has a negative effect on him and those around him.

Once you know where you character is going you can build them up around that. The how, why and when they get, or don’t get, what they want is completely up to you but isn’t nearly as important as how it builds them as people.