Writing: Building Great Characters

What’s good, book family? I’m back today to talk about something very important in your writing – character development.

Just a quick note: character development refers to how well you develop your characters on the whole, even before the writing starts.

Character arc determines how your characters change throughout a story.

Now, this is a highly subjective business, which makes it maddening sometimes. What one editor/agent/publisher loves, another will hate. It’s just human nature.

For me, though, character development is vital to your story. You need to know your main characters as well as you do your close family members. I mean, know them.

You should know how your characters think, move, speak, react, what their favorite shoes are, their favorite activities, hell, even their favorite cereal, if that’s, somehow, germane to the story.

But the point is that you need to know your main characters as well as you possibly can. Spend time with them. Sketch them out. Get to know them as characters. Have conversations with them.

Sometimes, I’ve taken to drawing maps of the places on which I write that includes where all my characters live and where the main settings for the stories are.

The world-building is the most fun part to me. We all know the stories behind Yoknapatawpha County with William Faulkner.

I do all this before I ever put the pen to the pad to write the story.

I want to build a world that pops with characters that are weird and unique in their own ways.

Now, while you’re getting to know your characters, you need to make them unique. Your peripheral characters can be flat. That’s OK. They are there to serve a purpose. But your main characters need to pop in all writing. It doesn’t serve anyone to give a reader a mundane character because he or she is “normal” and “like everyone I know.”

Readers know normal well. We live it, so we know what normal people and normal conversations look like. They aren’t all that exciting to us.

So, give your characters tiny traits that make them different from people. Make them want something that makes them extraordinary in ways.

I’m not saying you need to have characters that bounce of the walls like cocaine addicts, but what I am saying is that your main characters need to have traits that separate them from just being a run-of-the-mill human.

These things can be small like a character who can never find his favorite pen, or a character who repeats a phrase to herself or someone who likes to wear two different shoes.

These things should fit your character and not just be random facts, but those are the small details that separate your characters from boring characters.

Maybe your main character breaks up cigarettes and smokes them in a pipe. Or maybe she wears sports bras on the outside of her clothing. OK, that last one was a stretch, but you get the point.

Think of all the classic stories you’ve read and the tiny details main characters have had. Jay Gatsby’s “ol’ sport” or Dick Diver’s name in Fitzgerald’s Tender is the Night.

What you’re looking for is something organic in your characters that sets them apart.

That’s how you build dynamic characters before you ever even start writing your story.

You also get a benefit from this. At those times when you’re in the middle of the story and you’re stuck, when you don’t know where to go, you have an out. Since you know your characters so well, you can just put them in a scene, and see what they do, how they react.

Now, your story is starting to tell YOU where it wants to go. And that’s what we’re all after; telling the story as it wants to be told!