Creating Characters
Characters are my favorite part of most media. If you were to ask me about my favorite book or my favorite movie, nine times out of ten I would begin to describe to you my favorite characters. Because for me, characters are everything. They are the lifeblood of your story. They are the way your readers connect and they often offer us a glimpse into worlds unknown through their eyes.
I firmly believe that you can have the best thought-out plot in the world and the most beautiful prose but if your characters are flat, if I can't connect with a single person you introduce, then I'll lose interest fast.
Because that's what I'm looking for when I read, a connection. I'm looking to be shown a story, to glimpse into a life unlike my own. After all, who doesn't read for escapism? Have you seen the world out there? It's terrifying and exhausting. We need characters that we can project ourselves on, that we can see overcoming adversity and horrors and think to ourselves, “If they can do it then so can I.”
But what goes into character creation? How do you pull a concept from your mind and explain it on the page? These are questions even the most seasoned writers still contemplate and while there is no such thing as a right answer, no one answer that checks off all the little boxes, there are suggestions, there are observations, and I'm more than happy to share mine.
For added background, I have been writing since I was ten years old. Honestly, younger than that, probably closer to seven or eight. As my mother can attest, and all my elementary school teachers, I was an avid reader from a very young age. I even got in trouble in the fourth grade for borrowing classroom books without permission. I was one of those kids who could devour multiple books in one day and remember every tiny detail.
Of course, growing older and having a child, half my brain is now running around asking for a tablet, but what I have left still works and I still remember those days fondly. In terms of when writing came into play, I like to think they happened around the same time. Because once I read a book or saw a movie that stuck with me, I wanted nothing more than to know what happened next.
So I would write it myself.
Nowadays that's called fanfiction and seems to be hit or miss in the writing community. I'm here to tell you that, at nearly 35 years old, I still write and read fanfiction and it's still very much a part of my process. But in terms of my own work and developing my own style, that came later in life.
When I graduated high school, I was one of those few teenagers who knew exactly what they wanted to do. Ever since those tender ages I've mentioned prior, I knew that when I “grew up” that I was going to tell stories for a living. And while it morphed and evolved into something I couldn't even have begun to contemplate back then, I'm proud to say that that's exactly what I'm doing now.
But my favorite part, the one that I honestly didn't give much thought to in the early days, became creating characters. Even in video games, that first create your character screen still makes me internally dance with excitement. You would think the teenager who wrote self-insert Harry Potter fanfiction with original characters would realize that that was her favorite part, but I digress.
As my stories evolved and as I grew older, I realized that almost all of my writing projects started with a character. I would take some part of myself and bundle it in a different package, then present it like, “Ohh, hey, look at this completely different person that definitely has nothing to do with me whatsoever!”
The funny thing is that, as much as I enjoyed the process of creating a character, it wasn’t until I was in college that I thought about how my characters were behaving or why they were doing the things they were doing. I had a trope or version of the character in my head, and I may have had some background, but I didn't think about much else besides what I wanted them to do in the story. That was until I took a creative work writing workshop in my junior year of college.
I went to a small school, which meant the upperclassman courses were small and intimate. For creative writing, we could work on anything we wanted to so long as we presented something each week for the others to read and critique. Then, the next time we had class, we would all come together and one-by-one share our thoughts on the person's writing. An incredibly daunting experience for someone like me, who had kept most of their writing close to their chest or on the internet for strangers to consume.
Sitting there and having ten or twelve people tell you what they think about what you've written is terrifying. However, by then, I had finally got the energy and nerve to work on an actual novel, and I was chomping at the bit for any feedback, just something I could use to keep going.
I submitted a scene where there was a conversation between two sisters. It was fantasy, which was my favorite genre at the time, and in the conversation, one of the sisters had decided to adopt a child. The sisters were witches and the child was a vampire. I enjoyed the scene as it was one that I had co-written with my older sister and when it came time for my critique, I was incredibly nervous yet hopeful.
The first words spoken by my peers made me deflate.
“I couldn't follow who was talking unless you explicitly stated who it was.” Followed by. “Yeah, the conversation was really confusing and it didn't feel like an argument.”
Crushing, absolutely devastating.
I was a complete failure of a writer because the first piece of writing I shared wasn’t spectacular from the get-go. I think my teacher could sense my distress because he spoke next in a calming voice.
“I think you have a solid foundation,” he said. “But you need to consider the words that your characters are saying and how they are saying them. Right now, they are using the same language, so when it is broken out format-wise, they sound like the same person.”
Someone else chimed in with a gentler tone, “For example, the character of Lydia doesn't like vampires or children so she would be the one referring to the baby as ‘it’. Whereas, the other sister, Isis, is a mother and is more caring, so she would most likely use the baby's pronouns.”
What a simple, straightforward critique to completely blow my mind.
It was at that moment that I realized the characters weren't there just for me to tell the story that I wanted to tell, the characters were there because there was a story to tell and I needed to tell it in their voice.
It's that memory that I think back on frequently and had the most impact on how I approach characters today. After all, what's the use of writing an intense backstory if you're not going to let those elements come into play somehow? How does her husband's death fuel her agenda for the truth? Why does that couple refuse to see eye-to-eye on the most mundane things? What language would that person adopt if they came from a difficult background with absent parents? How would the grizzled detective approach a child who is so far removed from his own point of view because he was never a child himself?
These things make us who we are, just as they should make your characters who they are. Every person is unique in the way they speak, their experiences, their thoughts, their feelings, and it's all an imprint of their life up until that point. If you want to create a character who is compelling, you need to give them that same blueprint. Most importantly, you need to leave room for change.
While certain characters can be compelling for the mere fact that they never change, the reason for that is because the world changes around them.
The person we meet at the beginning of the adventure shouldn't be the same person we leave the story with. Just like the backstory you've outlined, what happens in their world is going to shape them and shape who they become. That's why you see so many writers joking about how the characters got away from them.
Because they should.
They should take you to unexpected and unpredictable places, you should be open for them to do so, because that means they're going to take your readers on a similar journey. I think it's easy to get caught up in the idea of writing something original, of wanting to set yourself aside from other writers. But you have to remember and acknowledge that popular tropes are popular for a reason.
We all love to hear about The Rebel falling for The Good Girl or The Quiet Person accepting the call of adventure. How many stories have been written about The Chosen One, the one person who can save everyone else? Subverting these tropes is fun but you need to know them well enough before you can do that. You need to understand why they strike a chord with so many people before you start to play another tune.
As far as being original goes, there's a saying I heard a long time ago and have seen repeated since by various authors: Every story has been written but not every story has been written by you.
Because whether you realize it or not, you are a character in your own story. You're the narrator, you're the director, you're the architect, you’re the one putting the words on the pages and showing readers what your characters are capable of. And as long as you keep that in mind, as long as you treat your characters like real people, then your readers will see them as such.
For more specific advice on creating and developing characters, check out Episode 009: Developing Characters of my podcast, I Got Nothing, a podcast for exhausted writers. I also highly recommend the collection of thesaurus reference books written by Angela Ackerman and Becca Puglisi. They are great for dissecting a character’s thoughts and actions based on things such as emotional wounds, positive and negative traits, occupation, and many more. I have the whole set.
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