Making believable characters will drive a story line. To make your characters more believable you should continuously observe your life and the lives of others. You have to be curious about people and how they think and use this information to make three-dimensional characters. Be honest, study reactions, and make notes of emotional and physical reactions. Keep a note pad with you (or use a note app on your phone) and jot down interesting characters you see in the mall, at the store, on your way to work, at work, airports, etc. Make a note of their characteristics (physical, mental, emotional, etc.) and make notes of the phrases they use and their mannerisms.
Before you begin to write your story, make notes on your characters. Give them a back story or do a character interview and answer questions like:
What do they say about themselves?
What do others say about them?
What do they look like (clothes, speech patterns, etc.)?
What is their history?
What was their childhood like?
Who molded their character.
What is the character’s present life?
You want to give them a personality, abilities and disabilities, history, hang-ups, goals; relationships to career, house, city, weather, traffic, etc. You may also want to give them past and present relationships with friends, family, lovers, pets. The more you develop your character, the more real they will become.
As you write your story, be willing to take your characters to the extreme and bring them back again. If there is no conflict, there can be no development or growth in a character. Your main characters should be well developed. The minor characters can be flat and static. Your characters will bring your story alive and drive the plot so let them do the writing. Do not have your characters behave and react contrary to the personality and history you have given them unless they are suppose to grow. Everything that happens in your fiction should involve some aspect of your characters. Do not force your plot on to your characters. Let them come alive. Let them decide the turns the plot should make and make sure that every action comes directly from that character’s personality.
A book that I review when creating characters is called The Complete Writer's Guide to Heroes and Heroines: Sixteen Master Archetypes by Tami D. Cowden, Caro LaFever, and Sue Viders. This is perhaps the most useful book I have found about using archetypes when creating characters, and I highly recommend it. This book describes the common male and female archetypes found in literature. When creating your characters, you want to layer them and not just pick one archetype. If you layer your character, it gives you more options and the character more depth.
My current project is a time slip novel called
Irresistible Forces. For my main characters, I filled out a "Character Analysis" worksheet. I describe as much of the character as in-depth as possible, including physical appearance, personality traits, and a back story. Since I am a visual person, I also find a picture that closely resembles the description. I find that this keeps me focused visually, which helps when I am describing the character in the story. Below is a link to a blank .pdf copy of the "Character Analysis" worksheet that can be downloaded. Feel free to print it off or save the paper and fill out the worksheet on your computer or device. I have also included three character analysis of the most interesting characters in
Irresistible Forces as an example (and to wet your appetite for the finished novel). Keep in mind while you are reading the examples that they are notes, so do not expect perfect grammar but do expect occasional randomness.
Examples from Irresistible Forces:
