Realistic, Engaging Characters in Fiction
How to Build Character in Novels and Short Stories
Sep 19, 2008
The Job Description Characters do most of the heavy lifting. They are the actors in the play. Their actions and words define and drive the narrative. Without them, there’s nowhere for a story to go. The Two Kinds of Characters
- Heroes – Heroes act out heroic adventures. It’s what they do.
- Ordinary People – Ordinary people who are thrown into extraordinary circumstances are the subject of much of narrative drama and tend to be more interesting.
Character Essentials
- Characters want something. If a character doesn’t want something, there’s no reason for a story, since getting that something is what moves the narrative forward. It can be as simple as staying alive. It’s called motivation.
- Characters are realistic. Even in fantasy or speculative fiction, characters need to resonate as realistic with readers. This means that…
- Characters are imperfect. Nothing is more boring that perfection and it’s characters’ imperfections that make them and their stories engaging. Facing adversity with the burden of very human flaws and weaknesses adds to the drama.
- Characters are sympathetic. Readers want to care about characters. Even villains, if for nothing else than to see them defeated.
Building Characters from Spare Parts
The best characters mix factual and fictional aspects. This means combining traits of people you know or have encountered in real life with purely fictional character inventions. Call it the “Spare Parts” approach. It’s a way to make characters who fit a story and vice-versa, and it lends them a fact-based reality.
Back Stories
Every major character needs a biography – or a back-story in movie parlance – that includes all the major events in that characters life, right up to the moment the story begins. Birth date and place, family situation, childhood traumas, school, work, relationships, and all the other critical facts. This is not just a matter of developing basic information. What your fictional characters have gone through in their lives will determine who they are and how they react when there’s a conflict. And conflict equals drama.
Describing Characters
Once you have characters you know and understand, it’s time to introduce them. This means describing them in physical terms. There are two important points to be made. Once again, perfection is not only a bore, it’s unrealistic. Second, readers don’t need a page of detail about a character’s appearance. Usually a few strong, descriptive sentences will do the trick and the reader will fill in the blanks.
Character Danger Zones
Don’t create characters that are Xerox copies of real people. And don’t base characters on yourself. From a truly objective standpoint, very few people have had lives that are interesting enough to make them worthy of a main character. In fact, basing characters on real people has the effect of limiting them to that person’s life outline. Paper-thin characters as developed or described are weaklings who won’t survive the long haul of a novel or even a short story.
Great Setting + Great Character = Great Story Research and hard work make for great settings. The same goes for great characters. Put strong characters in an evocative setting and you’ll be amazed at what can happen. Much like the magic of two fine actors thrown together, the scenes take on a life and momentum of their own. At the very least, by developing characters that are fascinating in their humanity, you’ll have taken a giant step toward creating a great narrative.
