This hasn’t always been the case, but when it comes to modern fiction it’s an inviolable truth that its your characters who make or break your story. Readers are happy to forgive any number of unforgivable plot sins and will cheerfully overlook absurd consistency errors and even *gasp* second rate prose – just so long as you can get them to care about your characters.
If you can create characters that feel real and complex, characters that drive the story rather than characters that are driven, characters that resonate with your readers and allow them to form an emotional connection (be it love or hate), you are most of the way to a successful story.
To that end, here are 7 tips to help ensure that your characters jump off the page and into the hearts and minds of your readers.
1. Understand Your Character’s Core
There are three foundational elements to any character and, before you start faffing about deciding what sort of socks they wear, how they style their hair, or what their favorite hot dog toppings are, it’s pretty important that you figure these three elements out. They are, of course, what the character wants, what the character needs, and what stands in the way of the character achieving either or both of those things.
If you’ve read any of the approximately 1.7 buh-jillion books out there on character development you’ll likely be familiar with these things already, but that’s because they are so fundamental to the topic that you can’t discuss it without talking about them.
These three elements are so foundational in fact, that the very first thing you should do when starting a new story is to jot something down for each of them. For both your protagonist and your antagonist. You can change things later if necessary (i.e. if the story requires it) but just having something in mind for your main characters’ wants, needs, and obstacles will really help you hone in on what the story is about (and what it isn’t about).
2. Create a Multi-dimensional Personality
The goal in any story is to have characters who feel like real people, and real people are usually defined not by their consistencies but rather by their contradictions. A kind old man putting out food for the neighborhood cats doesn’t stand out. He’s a kind old man, of course he feeds the cats. Meh. A grumpy old man who seems to hate everyone but is seen putting out food for stray animals, though… now that is interesting.
A three dimensional character’s personality doesn’t point in one single direction. In the real world, personality is less compass needle and more tangled ball of yarn. By simply making sure that some of your character’s traits are inconsistent, bent back on themselves, or even tangled up a bit, you’ll be much more likely to write interesting and memorable characters.
I wanted to provide a counterexample – a story where the writer didn’t follow this advice and wrote about boring, one-dimensional characters – but I can’t. I’m certain that I’ve read hundreds such stories, but I can’t for the life of me remember any of them. Funny that.
3. Develop Their Backstory and History
In many ways, people are the sum of all their experiences. Who we are today is the direct result of all of the things that we have done and that have happened to us. Who your characters are and what they say and do in response to the events in your story is largely dependent on what they’ve already been through, so it’s important to understand what pivotal moments in their lives have shaped them into the people they are today.
Keep in mind that these events don’t have to be of cosmic importance to the world at large. They just have to have been important to your character at the time – positively or negatively. Being rejected by a romantic prospect, working hard towards a goal and achieving it (or failing to achieve it), being too afraid to take a chance and try something new, or being brave enough to try – all of these are good examples of the sorts of events that can really shape who a person (or a character) becomes.
One other thing to remember when it comes to character backstory… it’s important that you know what has shaped your characters, it isn’t necessarily important that your readers know. If it is important that they know, then it is almost always the case that this information should be provided naturally through dialogue or (maybe) a flashback. Avoid the temptation to info-dump on your readers with a whole bunch of exposition about where your characters have come from and what they’ve gone through. You want to tell a story, not explain a story.
4. Build Emotional Depth and Complexity
A character’s strengths should be aspirational for your readers – the sorts of things that most people want to be themselves. Their weaknesses should be relatable – the sorts of things that we all fall prey to from time to time. A good character has both strengths and weaknesses. That means that a strong character should stumble from time to time and screw things up. A weak character needs to have moments of strength, moments when they stop being a punching bag and start punching back. Or at least try to.
Not only that, but their strengths and weaknesses should change somewhat over the course of the story. That’s not to say then need to be completely different people at the end of the story than they were at the start, but they do need to grow and change (more on that in tip 7) or at least have their strengths and weaknesses re-contextualized in light of the events of the story. What initially seemed to be a weakness turns out to be a strength in the right situation, for example.
One of the best ways to show the complexity of your character’s personality is to make sure that they face a combination of internal and external conflicts. An example of this in action would be a character who finds that the man she loves is exactly what is standing in the way of her biggest goal. Having the characters want (from tip 1) interfere with their need (also from tip 1) is a great way to set up a very natural sort of complexity. What we want in life (chocolate cake) is frequently not what we need (to lose weight). What we want, more often than not, gets in the way of what we need (stupid cake). These are the kinds of conflicts that most readers can relate to and sympathize with and they make your characters feel more real.
5. Make Their Relationships Matter
So far we’ve discussed characters in isolation, but isolation is not a character’s natural habitat. When we present our characters to our readers it’s in the context of a story, where they are bumping into and interacting with all sorts of other characters. The way your characters interact with other people is the most powerful way of showing your readers who those characters are and what they value. What does your character want out of their relationships? How do they go about getting it? How successful or unsuccessful are they?
It’s also worth pointing out that relationships aren’t always smooth and uncomplicated. In fact, in a story they should really not be. A story without conflict isn’t a story at all. Story is conflict. This should be reflected (to a certain extent) in your characters relationships with the people around them.
6. Give Them a Distinct Voice and Mannerisms
Your characters should have their own unique voices. The way they express themselves, from word choice to pronunciation to when they do and don’t say something at all is a big part of who they are and should derive naturally from their personality, their background, and their emotional state in the moment. Do they speak formally, casually, or colloquially? Are they terse or long-winded? Do they have any little quirks, mannerisms, or particular phrases they use that are noteworthy? Do they have an accent?
All of these elements can help your character to stand out and feel more real, but use them judiciously and go light on the gas when depicting them to your reader – especially with accents. The more you lean into a dialect or accent in your text, the harder it will be for your reader to actually read your story. Think of it like seasoning for a dish you’re cooking. You should use as little as you can in order to get the effect you want.
One very important aspect to this that I don’t see written about nearly enough is that your character’s voice should be distinct not just from the other characters in the story, but also from your own. It is very common for beginning writers to treat their characters as mouthpieces for their own views and ideas. The things your characters say and do should be true to who they are, not to who you are.
7. Allow for Growth and Change
As mentioned briefly before, compelling characters (with some notable exceptions**) need to change in some meaningful way from the beginning of the story to the end. If the events of the story are important than they should have some impact on the people who experienced them. If there’s no impact then how meaningful can the events really be? If nothing else, the climax of the story should involve some resolution, either positive or negative, of the character’s quest to achieve their want and/or need (tip 1). If they achieve or permanently fail to achieve that goal, they can’t help but be changed, if only in that they must now have a new goal.
More interesting, though, is to have your characters confront their flaws, fears, and desires more consciously. If you re-contextualize their strengths or weaknesses, how does that change how they see and interact with the world around them? If they have some trait that holds them back (internal conflict), do they manage to overcome it or does it cause their downfall in the end? As readers we find meaning in a story by how it changes the people who live the story. Characters who never change render a story meaningless.
** the exceptions to this are almost exclusively recurring characters in episodic stories – Sherlock Holmes for example. Sherlock never really changes as a result of his adventures, but the people around him do (Watson, for example). Detective fiction is one of the few examples of a modern story form that is largely plot driven rather than character driven and what works there is unlikely to work elsewhere.
Conclusion
Strong, memorable characters are multi-dimensional, emotionally complex, and have a clear arc that drives the story forward. Don’t be afraid to experiment and revise. Character development is an ongoing process that can, and should evolve as you write. Rome wasn’t built in a day, and compelling, three-dimensional characters are seldom born in the first draft.
As with everything else in your story, try things out and don’t be afraid to try something else if the first thing isn’t working. The tips above should give you a good start towards finding something that works for you.
If you found this useful or interesting, don’t forget to subscribe. You’ll get a weekly email digest of whatever I’ve posted that week so you don’t miss any other entertainingly useful stuff. In the meantime, happy writing, may the words flow freely, and may some of them be the right ones.
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Nice theory :D