There are so many articles / blog posts / noise about how to succeed in your writing career. You could go crazy trying to follow it all…and who has time for that? As an editor at two of the top publishers in New York City and now as a freelance editor, I have always aimed to make my editorial notes and advice clear and easy to follow. I want you to spend less time confused and more time writing. In that vein, here are a few quick tips to make coming up with realistic and compelling characters easier than you think.
Find pictures of all your characters and make an inspiration board as a starting place. Use this to grow pictures of how your characters act and think in your own mind. Once they feel like real people to you, it will be much easier for you to write about them.
Photo by Andrew Seaman on Unsplash Take some time to sketch out their stories. Their history, their present, and their future. What do they want? This doesn’t need to be long - just a couple of paragraphs - and you may not even end up using everything you discover inside your manuscript. But once your characters feel real to you and you know where they are coming from and where they want to go, they will feel real to readers as well.
Check your dialogue. Does it reflect the way people in your own life speak? For example, I often see writers using very formal dialogue to indicate a character is stiff or wealthy, but most real people use contractions. Instead, let the words they speak feel more natural and let the words they say and how they say them convey the type of person that they are. Read your dialogue out loud to make sure it feels realistic.
Avoid stereotypes. This should go without saying, but I see them all the time. If you’re concerned about how you’re portraying something more sensitive, run it by a sensitivity reader. This is worth it if you have any doubts about anything in your manuscript at all.
Avoid exclusively using props to show us who your characters are. For example - and this is also a stereotype - but I often see characters throwing glasses on “smart” people. And then instead of using description or dialogue to show us how smart the character is, the character is always putting on, taking off, or playing with their glasses. Props are fine but use them as more of a decoration than an easy way to tell us who your characters are.
Give your characters a chance to play. Now that they feel like living and breathing creatures, they might not want to follow your outline. They could have other ideas for how their story plays out. Let them lead you and see what kind of magic you can create, together!
Share your tips for creating characters in the comments!
Until next time,
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Thank you for this, Kristen. What amazed me most about writing a trilogy is how my characters grew in unexpected ways. I did the due process in the beginning of getting pictures, and writing character sketches, but throughout the writing process, my characters developed human responses, made mistakes, had moments of being bad-tempered, and persevered even though gripped by fear. Is it possible for a character to teach lessons to their writer?
I had a clear idea of what my main character would look like from a less known celebrity. I couldn’t remember his name, so thought my character could have one of his names too. After a google, I found my man, the image of my character. It turns out his name is a name I’d never have chosen myself but I’ve gone with it.