Roleplaying Characters

In a sense, whenever you are making characters, you are roleplaying. You have to choose what they say and do. Although they are distinct from you, you must get in their head and become them in order to manipulate them.

So what is the best way to roleplay your characters? I've found two ways that work nicely.

The first is pretty much what everybody does. Put yourself in the character's shoes and act as you imagine they would act under given circumstances. Characters grow the way you expect them to, and circumstances tend to form around ho the character approaches them.

The second method is to force your character down a path and find a way to believably explain it. For example, if you have a character who is a pacifist, you can force that character to become a violent warrior, but you need to figure out what could happen to this person that would change them so fundamentally and so thoroughly. It would require some mental power to figure out and plan. Though the simple answer is to make a whole lot of small changes over a long enough period of time.

I find both methods perfectly valid. It's nice to switch between them because the first method focuses on the character, making it the one unbending element of the universe. The second method makes the universe the one unbending thing, shaping the people inside of it, rather than the people shaping the universe.