How To Create a Solid Character for Your Story
Characters, when either you write an epic fantasy novel or a short story, always remain a focal point of a plot. No matter what challenges you throw at them, they take it and push the story forward.
Not only that. We remember stories mostly because of their heroes or villains. Even a simple mention of a fictional character we know and love could make our memories bloom or make us shiver in excitement. This is a power of well-written character.
But before learning how to write characters on the pages, they way people will remember them; we should learn how to create a fictional character, what to pay attention to when doing so.
Outer Layer
Outer layer is what we can perceive and learn about the character when we are only met them on pages. It’s their appearance and details of it. It’s how they hold themselves, how they behave, how they speak, their mannerisms. Through the character’s outer layer, we can roughly understand who a character is and their place in the world.
Character appearance
It’s all about how the character looks. To make it easier for yourself, you could divide this part into two categories. Inherited appearance and obtained one.
Inherited appearance.
Is the one a person has from their birth. Character couldn’t affect this part of how they look like there forth it can’t give us a hint about their persona, excluding their potential insecurities. But it will help you build the foundation of an image of how character look like. It hard to relate to faceless person. Also, it’s hard to work with a character face of which you don’t know, it’s creepy.
Anyway, to conquer that part of appearance, think about how your character’s face looks. Also, think what inherited traits do they have. Birthmark in a cheeky spot? Six fingers on a foot? Maybe they are a meter and half tall?
Obtained appearance.
This one is supper fun. It’s all about through what your character got in their lives that could affect how they look. Here we also can split it into two categories. Their body and their clothes/accessories.
The body. Scars are like story marks. Here a kitten used them like a jump pad and there a sword almost chopped off their hand! Your character may sleep badly or may be tired all the time. Why not add some bags and shadows underneath eyes? What body type they have, if they are a seasoned warrior on duty, it’s unlikely that they don’t have any muscles. Think about anything that could transform their body depending on the life path they get through.
Flashy things. Do they use makeup? Is it minimalistic and bleak or bright and over the board? Do they use cheap and practical clothes even if they could afford the finest one? Or do they spend all their money on the flamboyant flashy clothes even though they broke? Do they wear glasses or monocles (they are cool, fight me). Do they have a cane? Think about their overall style. What they put on themselves could tell a lot.
Character’s Behaviour.
We all act differently depends on the situation. The way a character behaves in conjunction with surroundings, other characters or as a reaction to events could say a lot about them. It could be a damn good markers of their personality.
Two things to pay attention when think about character Behaviour. It’s overall, well, behaviour and mannerism.
First is how character overall react and act. What they would do under the pressure; fight or flight? What makes them angry and could make them explode? What they would do when a person in need sits on the side of the road? How they react when someone invite them to an event? Forgive or avenge a grudge? Comfort their close one when they suffer? All sorts of stuff.
To make things easy, throw them in a bunch of difficult social situations and just think how they could handle them. Would they push a lever and save 5 people by sacrificing one? Didn’t do it and enjoy bloodshed? Or find another way, like jumping on a damn train and pushing brakes?
Mannerisms.
It is essentially a body language. If on a bigger level behaviour could be more explosive and obvious, mannerism is more subtle, or not, it depends. They could represent a variety of reactions to character emotional state.
For example: clicking a pen’s button. Is your character fiercely clicking the damn thing in the class, or does it meditatively while reading something in their home office? One case is impatiens, second is a state of deep thinking, maybe.
When you work with character mannerism, your goal should be to flesh out those subtle character reactions on their emotional state and add a bit of flavor to it. Some badass characters could crack their knuckles before crushing something. Cliche but funny one.
Character place in the world.
Who are your characters? Are they toy tinkerers? Wealth merchant? This part about your character’s place in the world, about social status, proficiency, social connections.
Think about their everyday lives. Their social status? Which job do they have? What skills your character posses? Their wealth. Do they have a family? Do they have a love interest? What about extended family?
Those questions could be not the most relevant for the story and depending on how important character is, you could even omit them. But spending five minutes on it could help have a couple plot ideas or even create the entire subplot.
Inner layer.
Inner layer is everything we could learn about character if we stick around with them for some time. It’s their whole inner world. It is what is hidden behind their behaviour, their personality type and traits. Reason for their mistakes, their flaws. The reason they can endure the lows of their lives, their strength. It’s why they couldn’t make a simple step forward, despite their fears. Inner layer it’s a character psyche on the palm of your hand.
Characters Personality
Personality is the core of your character. It is the reason a character behaves specifically. Here we include personality traits, personality type, belief system, morality, strength, flaws, fears, and their intelligence.
Personality traits.
Character traits are a basis on which their entire persona builds upon. Humans are complicated, so to make our job easier and not dive deep in psychological studies, for now, let us roughly divide character traits into three categories: positive traits, neutral traits, negative traits.
Positive traits could make your character lovable amongst readers and other characters in the story. Characters could be brave, be a soul of the company, be compassionate, etc.
Neutral traits. Those are grey cardinals of your character persona, at some situations they could play a positive role at some negative one. Characters could be dreamy, humble, ambitious, amusing, etc.
Negative traits. Those are little devils. Characters could be brutal, deceitful, callous, greedy, etc. If you want your readers to desire character’s death, go crazy here.
Those traits could define how a character could act in different situations. Brave, compassionate character would run into fire to save a puppy but a callous one may not bother to do so. Think what you want your character to be, how to act and assign fitting traits.
Experiment with them. Mix and much in different proportions. It’s like making wild cocktails. Your goal it to make those traits work together. Thought remember that you still need to keep balance. If you don’t, you end up creating a super evil overlord without reason to be evil, or a dull prince in shining armor.
Note. If you have hard time to come up with character traits ideas, here is the link. There a lot of them @_@
Strengths.
That what your character is good for. This could be a most defined virtuous character trait. It could be a firm belief in something and determination to follow it. It could be a particular skill or skill set they are just brilliant with, maybe they are the best gunslinger in the outer rim and have good piloting skills.
Think about what could be a powerful side of your character. Where do they shine? How does it reinforce their personality? How could you use it in a story?
Flaws
The good stuff. Actually, the bad, but the good one. Everyone is flawed, no one is perfect. So your character should be flawed as well.
Your character flaws could have a lot of forms. They could have biases and prejudices towards common knowledge, beliefs, or people. Characters could have an imperfection in their persona that prevents them from getting what they want. It could be phobias that yet again threw them in a pinch. It could be psychological disorders, maybe your character likes to have a snack with human liver at the meal, yes Hannibal Lector, I am watching you.
When writing flaws, think what could make your character a mess in certain situations. Or mess in general. Because how they would deal with those flaws is a hell of a different form of entertainment. And with them, they feel like a real person.
Fears.
What makes them shake, sweat all over, and hide underneath a blanket? That what about character fears is.
Think about what they fear people could know. What childhood fears they did not overcome. What their biggest fear? Character fears not necessarily should be a flaw. They could be afraid of door handles, for example. It does not necessarily hinder their story progress by definitely having a bit of depth to them. Why in hell are they afraid of them?
Every one brave until they meet their fear, add a couple of them to your character make them a little uncomfortable sometimes could be beneficial to the story.
Belief System and morality
Believing what right and wrong and willingness to follow or break those concepts encompass your character belief system and morality.
When you work on character belief system, it’s a good time to look at your notes about setting (You can read the blog post about how to work with a setting here). If you have specific notes about culture, for which character belonging to, it would be nice to sip in some of its traits in their belief system. It would be feel perfectly organic, especially if not all virtues of their culture would fit in their beliefs frame.
You can even mix some seemingly bad stuff there and make their belief system completely twisted and evil. Or in a mostly virtuous mind frame, add some darker tones. Imagine if Batman, instead of catching people, straight forward kills them. Oh yes, that was already done in “Flashpoint”, but, hey, it worked well.
Character morality is about relations of your character belief system with accepted beliefs in good and bad. Like that batman moment, we can’t say that bats killing criminals isn’t completely bad, but he kinda is not a role model either.
When you think about character moral compass, check out their belief system, which you already done. You will pin point their alignment from evil bastard, to kinda good guy, to the annoying paladin quite fast.
Here a twist, when you think about your character’s morality, don’t forget to write down in which circumstances they are willing to abandon their morality to make things done. Even that annoying, irritating paladin has their own limits.
Character intelligence.
This all about character smarts and knowledge.
You can define how smart your character is and in which field they have more wits by using previous section. What they personality? They rowdy and quick on action people? Then they probably could be as fast thinkers ready to try their hypothesis in action. Opposite if they are calm and cautious.
What they know about the world? They book smart or street smart, or other type of smart? That you can learn from their skill set, from their behaviour, from their history ( about that below )
When you think about character intelligence, don’t just think when either they smart or not and set the thin done. Thing in which field they are smart, how they approach a thought process and how they came up with solutions. Do they go to the instruction disassemble TV and try to understand what’s wrong? Or they just wack it with a hammer and it works, somehow.
Personality type.
It’s a collection of personality traits. If traits it a smaller behaviour tendency, personality type is an overall pattern of how your character’s behaviour, their preferences and reactions to events. Both traits and a type closely tied with behaviour from the outer layer, they are the source of it.
Learning a personality type is purely to make you understand your hero better. You can ignore it. It’s depend how important the character to the story.
To learn your character personality type, get to this website and get through a test. Keep in mind your character’s personality traits, their behaviour, and try to answer on questions from their perspective. Then read results and write a couple of notes.
Character History.
Our past defines who we are in our present. That is a reason your characters where they are and why they the way they are.
Think about their clearest memory. About the most sad one. About first one. What characters remember from their past life could help you understand what is important for them. You can realize part of their personality that you didn’t think about.
Think about their most hideous skeletons in the closet. They are the biggest disgrace of their life. Why they did it. What happened that they commit such a thing? It’s would help nail their morality and belief system, if you stuck, or build on top of it.
To truly understand your character, know their past. It could lead to some interesting conclusions about their personality and threw a couple more ideas to the plot, and that is always appreciated.
The Goal
Characters goal is the reason for the story to happen.
Goal born when character needs something or circumstances unfolds in the way, that force them to want something. They even could be forced to do something because of external force.
It could be anything. Desire of make your family life easier, so character participates in a deadly challenge in the labyrinth. Character’s dog could be killed and car stolen, resulting of him to desire kill them all, which he does. Or the little guy forced to bring a McGaffin to a volcano, lake, cliff and toss it from the edge.
You need to give your character goal strong enough for story to make sense and captivate people. Character goal is their biggest motivator it’s it not big enough for story you write, how do they will have motivation to achieve that?
Conclusion
Here we are. You characters like onions, they have layers. Build your characters layer by layers and you will be fine.
Keep in mind that even I would like to make this blog post a liner instruction like: do thing one, then thing two, I can’t do this. In most cases, writing process is not liner. You for sure will jump around between section of your character profile and will fill up them in a wildest order imaginable. It’s completely fine to be a messy creator.
