A Brief Guide to Successful Character Development

Characters are the players on the stage of your story and all successful writing starts with one. Readers engage with your story through your characters. The most important thing to remember when you create these characters is to make sure they have depth. By that I mean that each of them comes into the story with a long and detailed past (known as a backstory), have had experiences that moulded and shaped him, and each of them is driven in some direction — he or she has abstract ambitions and concrete goals. That powerful emotional experience comes when you weave such a convincing account of a character that your reader actually becomes that character. Creating believable characters means considering many aspects of real people and what distinguishes them from each other. Your characters exist so that your reader can get inside the skin of one of them. If you want to write truly memorable fiction, your best bet is to start with a wonderful character, one who leaps off the page and into your reader’s mind. Fiction writers spend enormous amounts of time developing and getting to know their main characters, imagining complicated life histories and digging deep to find plausible motivations. This is not wasted time! If you don’t know your characters, then your readers won’t, either.

Define your Characters

Of course, you’ll be original when creating the characters for your novel. And yet you’ll probably follow certain well-established patterns in how your characters function in your story. These patterns are known as archetypes. Look at a few of the most common archetypes in fiction: hero (protagonist), villain (antagonist), antihero, sidekick, and mentor. But still, you should avoid letting the archetypes turn into stereotypes and having stock characters. Make each character memorable whether it is by changing his appearance or any other detail. Make your character “roughly typical” in most ways which means making him “unusual for his group” in a few ways. A character’s feelings about his differences may well play a key role in your novel.

Embodying your Characters

As a writer, your aim is to create convincing characters to whom readers can relate, and so you need to portray people who inhabit real bodies and live in a believably physical world. Surprisingly often, writers forget that their characters are human and limited by physical constraints. Your creations must be believable – emotionally as well as physically – whether it is your main character or just has a small walk-on part. Describing your characters’ appearances gives readers a great deal of information about them without you needing to tell them too directly. For example, rather than saying ‘He was a very careless person.’ you can show this by describing his cluttered and messy home. Bear in mind that most characters are going to have a conflict between the way they appear on the outside and how they often feel inside. Childhood events often influence the adult character’s life by affecting their self-confidence or perception of themselves and the others around them.

Backstory: Giving Each Character a Past

Your characters were not born yesterday since real people don’t spring from nowhere. They all have long and complex family histories that go back into the deep sands of time. He also has an early life with many traumas and triumphs, disasters and decisions. Your character’s past is known as backstory and it determines what sort of person you have coming into the story. You have to understand where your character came from, or you’ll never understand what your character wants or why he acts the way he does.

Of course, you don’t have to figure out your character’s backstory all at once. As soon as you know all that backstory, you can’t help wanting to tell your reader. It’s painful for most writers to hear, but the reader is reading your fiction for the story — what’s happening right now — not the backstory. The backstory is old news. Although all the information you come up with doesn’t necessarily appear directly in your final piece of writing, it acts as solid foundation for you to draw on. Your job as a fiction writer is to suck the reader into the story so well that eventually, he/she gets curious about why your character behaves the way he/she does. That’s the point where you can slip in a sliver of backstory.

Creating your Character’s Backstory

1. Describe your character. How does he or she look like? Write down his birthday, eye and hair colour.

2. Birth, early childhood, and teen years. Where is he/she born? Who are his/her parents? What are his/her first memories? Was he/she good at school? Favourite subjects? School friends? What were his/her interests in those times?

3. Take him/her to adulthood. Who are his/her family and friends now? Did he/she go to college? Is there something which traumatized him/her? What about kids? Where does he/she live? How has his/her personality changed?

4. Interview your character. What has he/she learned so far? What change does he/she so desperately want in his/her life? Why? What would he/she liked to do and to be but can’t? Why?

Motivation

Your character has a past, but more importantly, he/she has a future. Your character is going somewhere or at least hopes to go somewhere. But the future is uncertain and nobody knows what they will do tomorrow. All you can know is what your character intends to do tomorrow. That’s roughly what people mean when they talk about your character’s motivation. A character’s motivation is made up of three essential parts:

✓ Values or those things a character holds most strongly to be true. A value is a core truth, something that’s “obviously true” to your character, but not necessarily to the others. A value needs no explanation, no proof or reason. Every character has values, and great stories thrive on conflicts between values. Some of your characters will inherit cultural values; others will create their own based on early life experiences. Remember that your character is most interesting when his values are most contradictory. When your character is perfectly consistent, then he’s perfectly predictable. So tie a knot in his soul, and watch him struggle.

✓ Ambition. Each character has an ambition which is this abstract thing that he wants more than anything else in life. Some characters know this early in their story, others only gradually develop an ambition. Regardless, that ambition needs to spring from the character’s values.

✓ Goal: the one concrete thing a character thinks will enable him/her to achieve their ambition. Knowing your character’s ambition is great, but it’s not enough to make a story. How exactly does he or she want to achieve that ambition? The answer to this question is the goal. The goal of your lead character drives the story and as soon as he has a goal, you have a story. This goal has to be objective, simple, important, achievable and yet difficult. Every main character of your story has a goal and all of them are crucial because some of those goals will often oppose the protagonist’s one and there will be a conflict, and also because each goal defines a separate thread of your story.

When you know your character’s values, ambition, and story goal, you can always give him credible reasons to act, because you already know his motivation. That’s all you need in order to write powerful, compelling characters rather than flat ones who lack depth and are therefore predictable. A character’s motivation is the engine of any story. If a character lacks motivation, the story will be just as aimless as the character.

Analysing Your Characters

Great fiction needs great characters, so don’t be afraid to rework them until they’re fully alive and three-dimensional. At some point, you should develop a character bible that spells out in one place everything there is to know about each character. You need this to maintain story consistency and to help you create fully rounded characters. It’s wise to start building your character bible before you start writing, even if you don’t know much about them. It’s also good to keep adding to it as you write your story and when you do your high-level read-through after you finish the first draft. It is a total must to know your major characters intimately, inside and out!

Developing a Character Bible

In your character bible, you keep a record of all the details that you need to remember for each character. Writing a character bible is a terrific exercise to get to know all the characters in your story. You can’t know in advance which details will affect your story later on and which won’t so record everything in your character bible, even details you’re sure won’t matter. Some of those insignificant details may suggest plot developments later in the story. What goes into your character bible? Just about anything that helps you understand your characters better or that helps you remember the myriad details that you need to keep straight. I recommend that you consider at least the following main categories:

• Physical traits. The appearance of your character is the easiest thing to track. You should record anything you consider important. Here goes the date of birth and age, height and weight, ethnic heritage, hair and eye colour, etc. In the bible include a detailed physical description, including scars or physical handicaps, along with the character’s usual style of dressing.

• Emotional and family life. Your readers want to know what your character’s private life is like so consider things such as your character’s personality and qualities, religious faith, political ideology, family (parents, siblings, spouse, children, etc.), friends and enemies, habits and mannerism, obsessions, flaws and quirks (because really no one is perfect!), happiest and worst childhood memory. What is his or her home like? How would your character describe himself? Know their weak spots and where they excel.

• Intellectual and work life. In this category, you should add the character’s education, employment, work skills and special talents, personal philosophy, hobbies, interests such as books and movies, etc. It would be easier if you write a detailed CV as if your character is applying for a job.

• Backstory and motivation. Here also go all the fears, hopes and dreams of the character. Spelling out your characters’ backstory and motivation in writing somewhere is critical, and your character bible is a fine place to put this info so you’ll always have it handy.

Remember that there is no complete list of features that you need to track for your characters so you should focus on the character traits that are important for your kind of story.

Setting out a Character’s Timeline

Most fiction deals with a certain limited period in your main protagonist’s life. It may be the time during his or her childhood or when he is in old age, reflecting on his life. But even though your story may not begin with the character’s birth and end with his/her death, knowing everything that happened is still invaluable: where your character’s life begins, where and when it ends, and all the stages in between – in other words a timeline of the person’s life. Usually, a short story focuses on a critical moment of a character’s life, while a longer piece builds up to this moment.

Show Character Development

Characters should discover new things about themselves, the others and the world in the course of the story. For instance, the core beliefs of your character can be tested, renewed or altered. Every person’s values and principles are subject to change over time. The environment may also affect one's personality and worldview. What if your characters live in times of war? How will they change then? Your characters are also going to change physically and develop with age and over time. Don’t keep them static, but instead have great fun by having your protagonists change throughout the story. People have their hair cut, grow beards, put on weight, and lose it again. As an example, I can give the Harry Potter book that I believe to be so beloved exactly because the characters grew along the readers and were at some way guiding them through their whole childhood. Hence always give your characters room for change so that they remain compelling to the readers.

Possessions and Clothing

Giving due consideration to all the physical objects with which your characters surround themselves can really help you create their personalities. The kinds of items people own and the way they feel about them show a great deal about their character. Some people are careful with their possessions, keeping them organised, neat and tidy, while others are chaotic and careless.

Objects are incredibly useful for triggering memories. Finding an object from the past is an obvious way to take the character back in time. You can add depth and subtlety to your fiction by using objects to symbolise a character. The object concerned can be something that the character values highly or is never seen without. In fantasy fiction, writers often use magical objects that connect to the character’s personality. Think of the wands in J.K.Rowling’s wizarding world that are the wizards’ and witches’ single most important tool which channels their powers and abilities. ‘The wand chooses the wizard, Mr. Potter.’

As a writer you need to turn into a Sherlock Holmes of a sort, noticing every single detail and sowing clues about your character so that the reader can deduce things about him/her without you spelling them out; for instance, a character who possesses a lot of books will be considered highly intellectual and sophisticated. Decide on the bits and pieces that your character deems important enough to carry around in a bag or in pockets. What about your character’s favourite possessions? Who gave them to him/her? Why is that ring so special for her?

Characters’ clothes also give away a great deal of information about them. Some people are slaves to fashion, whereas others don’t care what people think of their appearance. Therefore, one of the most important devices you have in your writing toolkit is the skill to describe and employ physical items effectively.

Find Their Source of Pain

In order to be realistic and just plain human, every major character you include in your novel should have some struggles. To do this look at their backstory. Make sure there is something giving them pain at the time of the story, not something they have already overcome. Another good way to reveal hidden aspects of your characters’ personalities is to put them under stress and see how they react; for example, when ill or when they have some kind of an accident. As a matter of fact, characters that have everything they need and want in life are boring and watching a character fell, but keep trying is far more intriguing for your reader than watching them succeed.

Using Memories

Providing your characters with memories is a great way to give them depth and create a past for them. Memories are so useful because they occur to characters in the present while they’re in the act of remembering, and so past is brought into the present of your story extremely effectively. Always keep your characters’ memories short, vivid and relevant to what’s happening in your story now. Memories work best when you use something happening in the present to trigger them, such as a smell (like freshly mown grass), a sound (like a piece of music), an action that seems familiar, a taste (maybe her grandmother’s cookery), or perhaps any visual prompt. Childhood memories can be pretty useful when explaining things that happened long ago and shaped your character’s life, personality, and may reveal why the person behaves as he does now. Note that showing these events through a flashback is far more effective than simply telling readers what happened. But always keep the flashback short, specific and focused!

Adding Layers to Your Characters

Everyone knows that people present only certain aspects of themselves in public. The rest, they hide away. Some parts are so well hidden that they’re repressed and remain unknown even to the individual. One of your tasks as a writer is to reveal these hidden depths to readers. Keep in mind that nobody is a hundred per cent good or bad. Everyone’s a mixture, and your characters need to be too – so don’t forget to give them flaws and foibles as well as hidden strengths.

Revealing Your Characters to the Reader

Creating the characters is the easy part. The hard one is revealing your characters to your reader while keeping the story moving. You generally don’t want to stop the story cold while you spend a few pages explaining a character’s motivation or backstory. Yes, you can use narrative summary to explain these, but often you’ll choose to show the reader who your character is instead of telling your reader about him. So how do you show your character to your reader? We have several valuable tools such as action, dialogue, interior monologue, interior emotion, description, and flashback.

Character Voice

Some of your characters may have a unique and distinctive way of speaking and thinking, which comes across in their dialogue and interior monologue. It also flavours their observations of the other characters. You may need to decide if you want your character to be sarcastic or make cheesy jokes. You aren’t required to give your characters a strong voice, but doing so makes your writing more compelling. The key to developing a strong character voice is to listen to real people perhaps in the bus, constantly asking what makes someone’s voice so unique and what it reveals about his or her personality.

The Art of Dialogue

Great dialogue is intrinsically dramatic. If you manage to master the art of dialogue it will reveal aspects of your characters and express conflicts between them. Dialogue is a wonderful tool because it enables characters to speak directly, giving readers explicit access to their thoughts and personality. In addition, lively, snappy dialogue is quick to read and breaks up long slabs of text, making your story more readable and enjoyable. Remember to always keep the dialogue short and to the point, and also to never use it to tell the readers something they already know.

Feelings and Emotions

Describing your character’s feelings and emotions can be difficult. You can all too easily fall into the trap of saying ‘he felt angry’ or ‘she was sad’, which doesn’t really convey the emotions directly to readers. But you can get around this problem easily. The golden rule of creative writing is to show your readers rather than tell them. The best way to convey characters’ feelings is through their body language. People often give away what they’re thinking or feeling through small, involuntary physical actions and gestures. One advantage of using body language to convey feelings is that you don’t need to spell out the emotions to your readers because they’re able to pick up what’s going on themselves. If you say ‘Maria was upset’, readers aren’t likely to feel upset, whereas if you describe the character’s body language, they’re more likely to feel the effect in their own bodies and thus experience the emotion directly. Also, to be able to convey character’s thoughts successfully you need to know the details about how he speaks and thinks like the vocabulary he/she uses, their views on a range of issues and their interests.

In this case, many writers use free indirect style which is when the author/narrator merges his/her voice with the character’s voice and takes on the character’s way of expressing thoughts and feelings. It’s an incredibly versatile approach and enables you as an author to get really close to your characters. Also, very usefully, you don’t need to keep writing ‘she thought’ or ‘he felt’ because the fact that the character is thinking is quite clear.

Fixing Broken Characters

Your characters are not written in stone. If you find a problem with one of your characters, then fix it! You can rework your characters to make them deeper, more believable, and more interesting. Characters are intriguing only when they have a strong and compelling goal. When they lack a good goal, they’re boring. If your characters are boring, you should better give them something to desperately want. On the other side, when the characters are shallow then there just isn’t much to them and the reader can predict what they’ll do or say. They come across as one-dimensional and their interests seem trivial and unimportant. The ultimate cure for this kind of characters is to better work on their values.

All in all, the great characters from your favourite books are the ones that stay with you long after you finish reading. These characters have power and longevity because they communicate and resonate with you, and most importantly because they have depth. Their authors create penetrating portrayals of fascinating, complicated characters that you return to again and again. As you dig deeper into your literary creations, you start discovering all kinds of aspects to their personalities and may well be surprised at what you find. You need to get to know your characters intimately so that you can be confident about exactly what they say and do in any situation. And yet remember that building a character is a bottomless well - you can always go deeper.

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Hi! My name is Radoslav Balev and I am 16. Storytelling has been one of my greatest passions so far. Therefore, I have always dreamed of a career in writing and now I am working on my very first fantasy-adventure novel called Dark Hedges. In addition, languages are what I enjoy studying the most so I am currently learning 4 foreign ones, including: English, Spanish, Portuguese and Italian. I also love reading and traveling. My motto is JUST KEEP WⒶNDERING... You can find me on Instagram and on Facebook.

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