Character Creation: Finally, A Use for All your Crazy!

Writing well-established, multidimensional, and interesting characters can be a challenge for some writers. It requires patience, insight, and a very specific type of insanity. Creating a good character requires the same sort of awkward, illogical mental gymnastics that actors use to become another person. As a writer you must place yourself, fully, in the mind of each and every one of your characters. Honing your character creation skills is a life-long process and now is always the best time to start. There are several strategies and habits that can help you do this. They can be helpful for beginners as well as experienced writers. 

Let me start by making one thing clear: well-written characters are the single most important element in fiction. Every story is essentially about characters. No story is about an event or a social/political/environmental/economic situation. All that is setting. Your story isn’t about a war; it’s about soldiers. It’s not about a hospital; it’s about doctors and/or patients. No story is ever about things that happen. Stories are about the people that things happen to. Characters are what your readers will respond and relate too. Don’t tell me that Joe died tragically. Tell me who Joe is. That way, when he dies, I’ll actually give a damn. Who your characters are and what they want will be the main driving forces that propel your story forward. What happens to them along the way is not nearly as important as how they respond to it.

A good place to begin is to create dossiers for each of your main characters. Do this before you even begin writing your story. Start simple. What is your character’s name? How old are they? What is their favorite color? What do they look like? What do they want? Include details that seem unimportant. Don’t worry if you’re not sure about something; your character’s dossier will change as you discover them more. Nothing you write is set in stone. Unless you write it in stone. Which is weird. Don’t do it. Unless that’s your thing. Live your life. 

Include a background story/ bio in each of your character dossiers. What has happened to them so far? How has it shaped them? These dossiers should take time. Don’t write them all in one day. Allow yourself time to mull over your character. How is their past / personality going to shape the story? Every time you add something to one of the character dossiers you should reconsider everything you have already written. Does a specific event change how you see the character? Should their appearance be adjusted? Does it change how they fit into the story? Maybe something you discover about a character will shift their dynamic with another character. One person’s dossier can effect another’s. Once you really know each of your characters, you can drop them into the story setting and know exactly how they will react. The story will almost write itself. Almost. 

The question is how do you discover a character? How do you know what they want? Obviously, a good amount will be uncovered as you tell yourself a background story about them. It is important, however, to cultivate an interest in and understanding of social psychology. By this I don’t mean that you should take classes or read books on psychology. If you want to do so, go right ahead. I’m sure it will help. There is a more direct and rewarding method though. Make yourself a student of human nature. Interact. Introduce yourself to new people. Ask people how they feel and think about things in their life. Be social. Be observant. Take time to objectively observe your own thoughts, actions, and motivations. Actors do this same sort of thing. They spend hours and hours getting into the head of their character. As a writer you have to do this for each of your characters. Reading helps too. Consider the motivations and thought processes of the people you read about. But for understanding human nature, nothing beats authentic human interaction. In your day-to-day interactions, be always aware of and attentive to how people are feeling/thinking. What actions do those thoughts and emotions eventually lead them to? Take an interest. As an added bonus this will make you a better friend and a more social person. You’re welcome. Literary advice and personal improvement. We’re a full service website.

As you build your understanding of human nature, there are a few exercises you can try to expedite your character creation process. Set up generic situations to insert your characters in. Create as many as you like (I usually create at least seven). These situations should be emotionally, mentally, morally, and physically challenging. Think of them as personality obstacle courses. Once you have thought up these situations write a short story about each character going through them. These short stories won’t be part of your final story (unless you decide you really love one of them). It is important that all the main characters are sent through the same situations. As you create these short stories and decide how each character handles them, you will uncover something about who you want that character to be. Since all the characters are presented with identical situations, you will also learn how they compare to each other. What do they have in common? How are they different? This will effect how they interact with one another. 

Another good exercise is to choose a specific trait in each of your characters and then reverse it. If they are brave, make them secretly cowardly. If they are kind make them callus. Turn one of their traits in an unexpected direction. Give them something that clashes a bit with the rest of their personality. This gives characters internal conflict and helps to make them multidimensional. If all your character’s traits are too consistent, they become archetypal, flat, uninteresting, and unconvincing. People are not simple. Give your characters some complexity. Maybe it’s a simple as: the gruff mercenary used to be a kindergarten teacher. Maybe it’s a huge as: the priest no longer believes in god. The bigger the gap between their overall character and their conflicting trait, the more intense their internal conflict will be and the more interesting they will become. Be careful though. It is good to have multidimensional support characters but if their conflict become too important, they will begin to eclipse the protagonist. If, as you develop your support characters, one of them becomes more interesting to you than the protagonist, consider changing the spotlight. I have changed which character is the protagonist many times in my own stories.  Whichever character you find most interesting, your reader will likely find them the most interesting too. 

There is some additional work that needs to be done on the main character. There are many ways people define the lead character or protagonist in a story. Personally, I prefer the theory that whichever character learns/fails to learn a lesson is the main character. Let me explain. In a sense, every story is about a lesson, something the protagonist needs to learn. By the end of the story they will either succeed in learning this lesson and be victorious or fail to learn it. This is the theory that makes the most sense to me. If there is not personal growth at stake, then there is nothing interesting about the protagonist or their journey. As you develop your protagonist, look for gaps or instabilities in their identity. Look for something about them that needs to / is in danger of changing. Something they can learn. Your protagonist should never be the same person at the end of the story as they are at the beginning. This is true for all characters but it is especially true for the protagonist. Or, if they do end up the same as when they started, it should be because they came close to changing and chose not to. They failed to learn the lesson presented them. Even in stories like this, however, there is still some change in the character. They are now cemented in their ways. The piece of them that was unstable or uncertain is now settled. For better or worse. 

Generally, a character’s journey should follow these basic stages: they begin in one place (metaphorically). As events unfold, their identity decides how they respond and how they move forward. Their desires or obligations drive them forward.  Along the way their perceptions and predispositions are challenged. They must decide whether to embrace these changes or to cling to their old ways of thinking. (Note: remember that these are the stages of the protagonist’s mental / emotional journey. They are not the stages of the story as a whole. Though they closely correspond, these two things are not exactly the same.) 

There is of course no one way to craft a story. There are no absolutes and no strict rules about how a person’s journey should unfold. Always challenge accepted strategies and find what works for you. These are only a few suggestions about how to get to know your characters better. Be strange. Be unexpected. Just be sure that you are doing so in order to be true to your story and your characters. Don’t be different just to be different. Be different because you genuinely see an interesting new way to tell stories. A word of caution: human beings have been telling stories since we were squatting around camp fires and hunting with sticks. It is the oldest of all art forms. You are taking part in an art that is fifty thousand years in the making. Over the millennia, we have refined and perfected strategies for telling stories that are interesting, valuable, and emotionally rewarding. The common design of story, shape, and character development is a careful distillation of the creative genius of every storyteller that has ever existed. If you think you have a better way of doing things, go ahead and explore it. That is the only way art evolves. But remember what it is you are challenging. The collective creativity of the entire human race. Past and present. I do not say this to discourage you but to excite you. If you have an original idea, then you have a chance to say something in a new way, to do something that has never been done since the dawn of time. Which is pretty badass. So be brave, be sincere, and have fun! 

Read more great work from Padraic on Floodmark.