Some Basics About Developing Characters

Know your Character: A good suggestion is to keep a page for each character with some of their vital information. This is some of the stuff I try to get, at least for the main characters:

• Name: This is important, because I stink at picking names. Pick a good name. Get help if you need it. (See this week’s poll) There are web resources that show popular baby names for each birth year back to 1880... Use it.
• Birthday: This solidifies their age, helps you keep it consistent.
• What do they look like? Basics, (hair, eyes) Extended, (Tattoos, scars)
• Have a back-story, even if it not going to come up now, it may later on.

Some other things to remember: These are people, and not puppets. They will have things that drive them, and by correlation, drive the story forward.

• How do they talk? Grammar? Idioms? Colloquialisms?
• Do they have goals? Of course they do. Write them down.
• Do they have strong/weak character traits? Do they have an anger problem? Are they physically clumsy?
• What do they do? Job? What have they done? Design a fake resume for them, because each job they have had will give them certain skills you may pull out later.
• Strange quirks? Do they do weird things that would have them stand out and be more ‘human?’ Chew their knuckles? Spit when they talk? Scratch their head a lot?
• How they react to things and why (history) - This includes:
• What are they afraid of? Loneliness? Isolation? Losing someone or something? 

I read a book one time where the main character had lost an eye; he was hyper sensitive about losing the other one. If a character had a relative drown, they might be skittish around water, or even have trauma echoes when pulling someone from the water.

• How they change in the course of the book/series.

Show your Character:

You do this by creating action... the things they do. Remember... show, don’t tell. In other words, don’t tell the reader that:

Bill felt sad.
Instead, tell the reader:
Bill choked back a sob as they lowered his friends casket into the ground.
Or:
He felt the hot sting of tears as he watched the casket dip below the lip of the grave.

In the latter two examples, you can tell that what he was seeing had an emotional impact on him.

Let go of your Character: Finally, let your Characters become people. Just because you start out wanting them to be X, doesn't mean they have to stay that way.

In ‘Kindled Love’ the characters ended up taking on a life of their own. Scenes that I wrote earlier didn't always fit, either in the story, or with the character that was in them. Anna ended up being a sweet, demure woman, but an earlier iteration of her had her much more outspoken and violent…

Angrily, she grabbed a book from the shelf and threw it across the room, striking his shoulder and cutting him off midsentence, “THAT is your problem,” she yelled, no longer worried if they woke Thomas. “You look for excuses over and over again, but you never want to deal with the truth; the truth is you just want to block everything out and feel sorry for yourself. I should know, I’ve been doing it for years.”

As I write, I allow my characters to develop themselves, to truly find their own voice. This is an important part of the B through Y journey, since people only want to read about believable characters. If you try to cookie cutter design your characters, then they will come off fake every time. 

I hope you enjoyed this brief glimpse of Characters. In future posts we will look at story development, setting, theme and other things that are important to making your story come to life.