Writer's Tips: Your Characters
All right, as I
said at the conclusion of my last post, in this one we’ll discuss a few things
I’ve found helpful for creating and developing characters in my stories. Most of the tips I mention here will be
strictly my own opinions as I convey more of how I personally develop my
characters rather than sharing with you the advice of others. Of course, there are dozens of books on how
to write fiction well though. Just check
out your local bookstore and you’ll find a whole section. I’ve flipped through a few books myself
before in Barnes & Noble and Books-A-Million.
So where did we
leave off? You still have your great
story plot and are eager to get your story down on paper, and now you’ve
established the background, time period, and setting for your book. Now for your characters. I read once that creating and developing your
characters is the most important element in writing fiction. If your readers don’t like your main
characters, they probably won’t finish reading your book, and if they can’t
relate to them, it won’t hold their interest.
I told you that
many people consider the background, setting, and time period to be the first
things to establish in writing a story.
That isn’t true for me though.
Every story I write begins with my main character(s), and then the
entire story plot follows after I’ve created an intriguing character in my
mind. When you’re creating your
character, one of the main points to keep in mind is that you absolutely have
to take into consideration who your audience will be. If you’re writing a children’s story, you
don’t want your main characters to be teenagers; if you’re writing for early
teens, you don’t want your book to be about twenty-something-year-old college
students or adults. Your readers need to
be able to relate with your main characters or at least to one of them if you
have several main characters. This is
mandatory. Clearly, this does not mean
that your readers will have found themselves in your character’s situation
before, but they need to understand the emotions and motivations of your
character and be able to relate to them.
This can most easily be achieved if you keep the age of your character
around the age of your readers or younger than your readers’ age, in some
cases. Younger characters can still hold
an adult reader’s interest in some instances- many adults enjoy reading young
adult literature or even older children’s stories, but most times, this isn’t
the case for teenagers or children so it’s best to keep the main character in
their age group. Above all, like I said,
it’s imperative that your audience can understand the emotions and motives of
your character. This also plays into the
age-appropriateness of your over-all story plot. If you’re writing a children’s novel, you
clearly wouldn’t develop a plot about a complicated story of unrequited
love. This would not be age-appropriate
nor would your readers be able to relate to those kinds of emotions yet,
although a boy-meets-girl and they live happily-ever-after kind of story may be
fine for adults and young adults if it’s written within limitations. (We’ll discuss that in another post.)
In order for you
to create and develop characters that your readers will relate to, you have to
first understand your characters yourself.
If you can’t identify with your characters, nobody else will. The most commonly suggested way to do this is
probably to write a character sketch for each of your main characters. If you don’t know what this is or how to
write one of these, do some research on Google for a definition and some sample
character sketches. Personally, I don’t
write a character sketch for my characters, but nonetheless, I can certainly
see the benefit and advantages of writing one and think it’s an excellent idea
to at least jot down the general information of your character: his name, his
age, his interests, his morals, his background, his physical appearance, his
quirks, and the like. Doing this will
help you keep all of your information straight and consistent throughout your
story. For instance, in one of my books,
my main character has a quirk of rubbing the back of his neck whenever he’s
embarrassed. In order to develop this
into a recognizable characteristic, every time my character was embarrassed, he
needed to rub at the back of his neck.
Having this quirky detail jotted down somewhere would help me remember
to include that detail in my scenes.
So you have to
relate your character to your readers.
Check. What about physical
descriptions? Well, honestly, I’ve
written stories where I don’t give my reader a flat-out description of my main
character, but I think it’s generally a good idea to do so. This can be pretty tricky though to describe
in a way that’s not considered amateur.
Again, I read once that authors often describe the physical appearance
of their characters in three primary methods that have become overused until
they no longer hold any vitality- they’ve become clichés. 1. A character will look into a mirror and
the narrative voice will describe the character’s reflection (I used this one
before when I first began writing). 2.
Another character will see the character you’re describing, and the narrative
voice will tell you what the person sees when they look at the other character. Or 3. The narrative voice just adds a random
paragraph of description which is completely irrelevant to the over-all plot
and it disrupts the flow of the story.
Below are examples I’ve written to show you exactly what these methods
look like in literature.
1.
Megan stood before the dresser in
her bedroom and sighed discontentedly as she surveyed the girl staring back at
her in the mirror on the wall. Brown
stringy hair, youthful splotches of acne, awkward metal braces on her
teeth… She sighed again in dismay. Why couldn’t she just look like the popular
girls in her school?
2.
At the sound of the door opening,
the principle glanced up from the book lying open before her on her desk to see
a young boy enter the office with a teacher’s assistant. His ruffled dirty blond hair appeared as though
he hadn’t brushed it that morning, and his clothes were rumpled and
wrinkled. The knee of his jeans even had
a tear in it, revealing where a bandage had been affixed by the school
nurse. The principle noted the streak of
dirt across the boy’s face as he shuffled toward her desk, keeping his gaze
lowered to the floor ashamedly. He had
clearly been fighting.
3.
Steering his car into a parking
space, Cory brought his vehicle to a halt and stepping out, started toward the
front doors of the restaurant.
Cory had carefully-combed
auburn hair and dark green eyes, and his handsome ruddy face was peppered with
freckles across his cheeks and the bridge of his nose. He was well-built from playing football in
high school and now being a part of his university’s team.
Reaching
the front of the restaurant, Cory swung open the door and entered to see his date seated on a
red-vinyl-covered bench, waiting for his arrival.
All right, now
those examples honestly didn’t sound all that bad, but hopefully what I meant
should still be pretty clear to you. Describing
your character in these ways adds nothing to your book’s plot and is only a
distraction from the story you’re trying to tell. It breaks up the flow of your story for the
reader. A better way to describe your
character’s physical appearance is to subtly interweave those details into natural
action of the story so it doesn’t detract from the scene of your book. It’s important though to make sure you
describe your character’s appearance early on in your book before your readers
already formulate their own mental picture of what your character looks like,
otherwise, chances are, they’ll keep the former image they had created in their
minds rather than adopting the real physical appearance you describe. Let’s take the first situation above and use
this better technique to describe Megan’s appearance.
Standing at the
dresser in her bedroom, Megan ran the bristles of the brush through her brown
hair. She sighed in discontentment as
she surveyed the girl staring back at her in the mirror on the wall. Reaching up and touching the ends of her hair
hanging stringy down to her shoulders, she made a disgusted face at her
reflection. She set down the hairbrush
on the dresser top and commenced to massage her acne-treatment lotion into the
infected pores of her face. “I think
the doctor lied to us,” she thought to herself. “This stuff doesn’t work at all.” Turning away to her bed, she rummaged through
her messy purse until she found her package of chewing gum, but as she pulled a
stick from the pack, she halted in the motion, remembering the metal braces on
her teeth. Chewing gum seemed invented
to get stuck in metal brackets. She sighed
again in dismay as she cast a glance over her shoulder back toward the
mirror. Why couldn’t she just look like
the popular girls in her school?
See? In this paragraph, I described Megan exactly
how I had described her in the first example, but you actually saw Megan’s
actions and were able to sense how she feels about herself at the same time
that I described to you what Megan looked like.
The details were subtly woven into the action of the story. This is how good writers describe physical
appearance to their readers.
Another point of
developing your character is their simple actions. By simple actions, I mean the way they walk,
the way they drive their car, the way they eat… the way they do things. This can tell a lot about your
character. For instance, if my character
wolfs down his food, leaves greasy fingerprints on his juice glass, and drops
crumbs all around his plate, then you would generally get the impression that
my character is a pretty messy and possibly even crude person. Of course this would not be enough to give my
reader an accurate judgment of my character though; after all, he could
be messy and crude, or he could’ve just been in a big hurry that morning during
breakfast. Determine how your character
walks. Does he shuffle like a laid-back,
easy-going fellow? Or does he take brisk
strides like he’s a man on a mission with things to do? How does he drive? Does he blare his horn in traffic, indicating
he’s a very impatient person, or is he the courteous, conscientious type of
person that’s always careful to drive at the speed limit?
I realize this
is a lot of informative, but hold on; we’re almost done. Bear with me for a little longer now.
Facial
expressions and body movements. This is
a big one in my mind. You can tell a lot
by someone’s facial expressions and body movements when they talk and
work. For example, let’s take a look at
part of a conversation between characters.
Without facial
expressions and body movements:
“Hannah, I don’t
know how to tell you this,” Austin began.
“What’s wrong?”
Hannah questioned. “Is something the
matter?”
Austin
hesitated. “Well… my manager needs me to
go on a business trip this weekend so I don’t think I’ll be in town to take you
to your college’s dance Saturday night,” he explained.
“Do you have to
leave this weekend though? Can’t it wait
until next week?” Hannah asked.
“No. I’m sorry, there’s nothing I can do about
it.”
With facial
expressions and body movements:
With a heavy
sigh, Austin took a seat on the park bench beside Hannah. He inaudibly drew a deep breath before
breaking the silence. “Hannah, I don’t
know how to tell you this,” he began.
Hannah cast a
glance up at him. “What’s wrong?” she
questioned worriedly. Concern marked
across her countenance. “Is something the
matter?”
Austin
hesitated, taking her hand in his.
“Well… my manager needs me to go on a business trip this weekend so I
don’t think I’ll be in town to take you to your college’s dance Saturday
night,” he explained.
Hannah gently
laid her other hand on his arm understandingly, forcing a reassuring
smile. “Do you have to leave this
weekend though? Can’t it wait until next
week?” she asked quietly.
He shook his
head, reaching up to run his fingers over his hair as he gave another deep sigh
in regret. “No. I’m sorry, there’s nothing I can do about
it.”
Without the
facial expressions and body movements, it was a little difficult to tell the
emotions of the characters involved in this dialogue, wasn’t it, to say nothing
of its choppy style. This couple could’ve
easily been interpreted as rash people with a strained relationship that
erupted into a heated disagreement again rather than being the loving couple with
an understanding relationship that I had intended Austin and Hannah to be. That’s why facial expressions and body
movements are so important to developing characters. Besides adding interest to a story, they also
show what kind of a person your character is.
Is he a grumpy person that scowls all the time, is he a sensitive person
that cries easily, is he a cheerful Pollyanna-type that always wears a smile,
is he very expressive and animated so that he gestures with his hands when he
talks? Just like you can tell a lot
about a person’s countenance and actions in real life, so it is with fictional
characters. We’ll talk a little more
about actions later.
Another
important method of developing your character is by their dialogue and speech
pattern. This element however, is a bit
too in-depth for this post, so we’ll save that topic for next time.
The ultimate
goal though is to make your characters “irresistible” as I call them. I try to make my characters so likeable that
my reader grows to like them before he even realizes it. Make your characters unique individuals. Give them personalities and quirks; don’t
make them stereotypical. Not every hero
has to be dashingly handsome, sport a five-o’clock shadow of a beard, and be
Superman-strong. Not every heroine has
to be a gorgeous glamor girl that could win any beauty contest she enters. Making your characters unique gives your work
freshness and vitality, and it enhances your experience as a writer by
challenging you to find other facets to your character that you can make
“irresistible”- likeable and appealing to your readers. For instance, you make them be unusually
considerate or have an uncommonly compassionate heart or always be looking for
opportunities to serve others and to do a kind deed. Study human emotions and different
personalities; real people are unique individuals with differences that you can
observe and apply to your characters.
Make the people in your story stand out and leave a lasting impression
on your readers. Above all, get creative
and have fun! Next time we’ll evaluate how
to write realistic dialogue.
