Creating A Character

This blog post is one long overdue. Now, in writing this I'm not claiming to be some sort of expert, but I've been to a few lectures and read a few craft books, so I figured I'd relay some of the information I absorbed from those.

I'm planning on making a bit of a "series" per se about character, so consider this the first of more posts to come.

So now, to the post: One of the most important parts of writing novels—particularly if you're writing a contemporary—is creating the characters.

But the question that most of us writers ask in the beginning is: Well, how do I do that?

Characters often spring into our heads from unique qualities in other people that you noticed, or as a companion to the story idea that's held you captive for months, but creating a character is much more complex than having this idea and rolling with it.

There are a lot of components to creating a character, but I would argue that main one is the character's desire. A character desire is something every character in your novel must have, and can simply be defined as what the character wants throughout your story. This is super important, and ultimately drives the plot.

In addition, if the character's desire is strong and SENSIBLE then it will help the reader identify with and sympathize with the character. When I say sensible, what I mean is that their desire HAS to match with their history, their personality, etc.

And that leads us into the next part of creating a character. You have to understand a character's backstory; everything that happened in their life before when the story takes place. This is because you need to know who the person is at the beginning so that you can see the development by the end.

To understand your character in these ways, question things such as what their major psychological traumas or scars are, what their hobbies are, any interests they may have, any sports they played, a TV show they'd watch or did watch (if it's fantasy, assuming they lived in this world), their speaking style, their favorite foods, if they have any pets, what their sexuality is, etc.

All of these things will help you understand how their life likely was before you begin writing them, and help add a realistic component to them. If you can have a scene where they revel in a hamburger their eating as they watch football, if those are details you think apply to your character, then they will feel more accessible to your audience, and for anybody who loves hamburgers or football, there will be more of a bond between reader and character.

In addition to all those things I've listed above, as a writer you should also know the characters idiosyncrasies—do they pick the label on a beer bottle when their nervous, or do they love the smell of gasoline because their dead grandfather who they admired always loved the smell of it, or do they run their hands through their hair unintentionally, or do they use the phrase "that's bananas!" all the time, or do they eat their food in some sort of color coded order?

These are the types of things that will develop a character more deeply. While before I mentioned knowing their hobbies and backstory will add a sense of realism to the character, these mannerisms unique to your character are what will really make your character spring to life.

Knowing these things and being able to show these things consistently also tie in to showing instead of telling. If you know that the character bites their lip when they're nervous, that is a way to show the emotion rather than tell it.

For example, if you were to write a scene where the character is waiting for something, it could be written like this:

She was nervous. Every bit of her longed for the news to come back, if for nothing else but peace of mind.

BUT, if you can delve further into the character and include idiosyncrasies, all of these scenes are shown, rather than told, and suddenly the character feels real:

She was getting annoyed glances from everyone else in the waiting room as she tapped her foot endlessly. Every time the door opened, she quit biting her lip and jumped up to receive the news, but each time it was for a different name. So she would sit back down, and begin the tapping again.

Not only is this more detailed and more descriptive simply because it examines how exactly the character displays apprehension, it also implies everything that was outright stated in the first example.

But how do you come up with all of these details (and trust me, I know it seems like A LOT of work, but I promise you it will pay off in the long run)?

Well, take all of the examples I listed when talking about mannerisms. Each and every one of those are things that I have observed other people doing, or little anecdotes friends have told me in passing. To me, that is the easiest way to create a character. Watch your friends, watch your family, watch strangers—pick up on even the littlest of details in everyone around you, and then you'll be armed with an arsenal of idiosyncrasies that you can use when it comes to creating your character.

Now, the last thing I'd like to talk about, is what you show your reader on the page.

I've mentioned a lot of things in this blog post that you have to understand about a character, and as I said, this is part of a series, so this isn't even where the creation of your character ends, but with all of this figured out, you're going to have to decide what bits of the character are actually going into the story, and how to show them.

Just because you know your character played soccer in fifth grade DOES NOT mean you should add a scene where the character flashbacks to their fifth grade soccer tournament; just because you wrote down that your character had a big heartbreak in high school DOES NOT mean that this should somehow become the focus of the plot (unless of course, it was what you'd planned to write about in the first place).

All these details should go into shaping how your character acts. Instead of explicitly stating it, your character can be particularly guarded in any romantic interaction. That lets the reader know just fine that they likely suffered a heartbreak. And have a scene where the character needs to use the agility they developed from soccer, but don't shove in extra details about how they used to play it.

Essentially, only put in the details that the reader cannot figure out on their own but must know to understand the character and their actions; any extraneous details about the character will take away from the story.

And that, my friends, is where I'm going to end this post for today. Over the next few weeks I'm hoping to put out a few more posts on finding names for your characters, how your characters are expressed, the different kinds of characters, and detailing human complexity and how characters change, so keep an eye out for those.