Some of my favorite characters to write are my sarcastic, witty, annoying characters that just make everyone say, "I love him/her but I hate him/her at the same time!"
These are my kind of characters.
Now, every person has a character personality that they're good at writing that some aren't good at writing. Some may be good at flirtatious characters, or scared quiet characters, while others are just the opposite! In the couple years that I've been writing, I've found that it gets annoying trying to write these characters when you don't know how to express those emotions or have anyone express them to you. So, I can't write the flirty characters, but I can write rebels, and so I'm going to help you start in the right direction of writing these.
Step one: face-claim.
If you have a good face-claim that looks and feels like a rebel, then you'll feel obligated to toss in a rebellious spirit into that character.
You can't have a character that looks like this:
Act like a character that should look like this:
Face claim (In my opinion) is one way to help your rebel take flight. The best part is, you can name your character literally anything and will be cool. because if you have a super sweet name, and a not-so-sweet personality, it's gonna be fantastic.
Step two: Aesthetics/quotes
If you just scroll through city aesthetics or snarky quotes it'll help you get a basis for what your character's personality will be like.
Just a few to start out with:
(your character may not ride a motorcycle or do graffiti, but I just said it was a start)
Step three: Actually developing the character
Why read a blog post about writing a sarcastic rebellious character if you're never gonna actually write him/her?? If you have a good backstory for the character, write it out as a test run! It'll help you start out with the development phase, and if you still need help with stuff, grab a friend and have them ask the characters random questions to put the characters brain to the test. You can go on for as long as you want until you feel like your character is ready to be plugged into his/her appropriate story.
Step four: character dialogue/ facial expressions
Character dialogue and expression is VERY important with these characters because thats how you show how bratty they are when you can't see or hear them in person.
Each character has their own way of answering a question, and most of the time it depends on the character themselves, but with your now rebellious character, they should be able to answer with different attitude than most characters.
If I were to ask my character Alex and Georgia (both from The Power Within) The question: "What is your opinion on school?" They would both give me very different answers.
Georgia would be more like, "It's... Fine? I guess???"
But ALEX on the other hand would be much more blunt with her answer which would probably something like: "Psh, it's stupid." (Her answer would be soooo much longer than that because she has a very strong opinion about it, but I gave you the short answer because I wouldn't want to bore y'all.)
If I were to ask them both that same question and tell them to only give me facial expressions to answer me, Georgia would most likely just give me a helpless look and a shrug while Alex would roll her eyes ever so dramatically and wish she could talk.
In the end, it's all up to you, but these are just some helpful pointers to get you send in the right direction. (At least I hope it was helpful :P)
