The foremost characteristic of Good Fiction is its ability to mirror reality: this is only possible when the Human condition is interwoven with narrative, creating an experience that transcends fiction.
If you’re going to create a compelling story, you must invest in building lives that are too real to put down; essentially, your characters must present memories and situations your readers can recognize or relate to.
Such an achievement is the budding of an intimate connection between the reader and your character. I concur with Donald Maas’s realization that the ultimate goal of fiction is to take the reader on a journey of their own. This to me means, fiction should be allegorical opportunities for one’s own reflection.
So, how can you make your character FEEL like a real person, with real hurdles and real goals?
STRUCTURE YOUR CHARACTER
Every Important Character that lives on the page must have been put together beforehand. Never write a character off the top of your head because that’s how you set yourself up for developmental problems.
Even if you consider yourself a pantser, you should at least have an outline of what your characters will be.
There are 5 important items that must be outlined for your Main characters and their supporting characters:
1. Backstory
2. Motive.
3. Physical Attributes
4. Flaws.
5. Behavioral Attributes
Additional Note:
Every immersive reading experience is built on the connecting dynamic between the Protagonist and multiple characters (Character-driven) Or, the Character’s responses to story events (Plot-driven). If you want to tell an impactful story, first answer Why the Main Characters have to do anything at all.
Important preliminary questions:
1. Why are they going to leave their status quo for the sake of anything?
2. Is it believable?
3. Are the stakes high? How high?
4. What if they do nothing? Would they be able to continue in peace?
The Important 5 for your Characters
Your Character needs a Strong Back-Story:
A strong backstory should give meaning to characters and add an argumentative element to their choices. Backstory shows the character’s past and how they came into their current Status Quo.
A character’s past could be the reason they are after something! It could also be the reason they behave in a certain manner and respond to certain things in a certain way.
The best ingredient for a a strong backstory is a critical event that becomes the driving force of that main character. This event could be meaningful in diverse ways:
- Traumatic to the character
- Foreshadowing of a future
- Expository about a Character’s attribute
Furthermore, Backstory adds reason and insight to the complexity of a character; it explains where the character is coming from and where they are possibly headed. Good practice in storytelling is to reveal bits of backstory as the story unfolds: it could be revealed in dialogue with other characters, or in how a character interacts with important scene elements.
Learn more about dialogue in fiction writing here.
Moreso, a character’s story can also be revealed at crucial plot points, with devices such as Flashbacks. The aim of masterfully infusing more information, bit by bit about characters is to add to an immersive reading experience. So, in a surmised statement, your backstory greatly contributes to the story’s narrative and can make your character understandable and relatable.
For Example:
A character who struggles to open up emotionally may have been a victim of various forms of abuse in the past; a character that lives brazenly may have lost everything valuable in the past and is now seeking their own demise; a character with a short temper may have been victim to a restrictive, demanding and short-tempered parent, or they could be vocal and imposing about their own opinions because they’ve suffered low self esteem and lived their lives feeling unseen.
There are so many ways to spin a believable character!
Your back story should be relevant to the plot of the story and not a diversion. You don’t need to have a separate chapter for exposition on your character’s backstory. As a matter of fact not every aspect of a character’s backstory makes it into your book. See the character’s backstory as echoes from the past showing in their present nature. It is more of a guideline for you, the writer, to accurately depict the character to the reader.
Character Motive:
Motive is the lifeline of a character-driven story, and the atomic units of any plot-driven story. It is the ultimate reason behind the actions of your character. For every important character, it answers the question Why?
Why is a character leaving their Status Quo? They want something.
What do they want? Why is it important? Because it’s crucial to something that happened in their past, or it is important to new information they just uncovered in the beginning of the book.
Every important character should have a motive in your book, especially if they’re going to appear regularly on the pages. You can either foreshadow their motives as supporting characters, or explicitly interweave their wants into the storyline (Main characters).
The motives of characters often collide and create dramatic content for your book, but you can botch such an opportunity if you don’t plot your story beforehand.
For your main characters, their motives are usually revealed earlier than others, unless the author is aiming for such a dramatic effect. In the makings of a character’s motive, it could be one that has just recently been discovered, or in a different scenario, an opportunity arises to achieve a character’s goal.
This conquest will be the machination that disturbs the main character’s status quo: an event that upsets their lives; new information they cannot ignore; the redemption of a price they must pay; the call for help from an important loved one, etc.
For your supporting characters, their motives are usually held in suspense till a later part of the book. For some others, the motive of the supporting character may cause a bond with the Main character.
Physical Attributes:
Unless you’re writing a book about robots, you should give your readers descriptions that help them visualize your character. A reader wants to picture everything that’s happening in their mind’s eye, and the more attached they become to a character, the more they’ll want to know intricate details about their looks.
Include character details such as age, body shape, disabilities, hair color, height, scars, tattoos, or even cultural markers. However, your expression of these attributes must be measured by the POV in use.
For instance, in a 1st Person POV, you write as one who experienced (past) or experiences (present) the story. You can’t tell your readers how tall you are, what color your hair is unless you’re making an exposition for the purpose of the story.
Example:
DON’T DO THIS:
I caught the twinkle in her gaze when she noticed my red hair, my 6.1 height, and my chiseled form.
Could you probably get away with that? Yes. But it’s just weird. A more realistic tact would be to reveal traits about characters in the eyes of other characters (i.e., if you have a multiple POV story.) An easy solution would be to have the character describe themselves if they saw their own reflection, or to mention details about their looks in passing—in their own thoughts especially as it relates with interactions with another character or their perception of themselves.
Do:
I straightened my tie and dusted my hair, hoping my red mop wouldn’t scare her away..
In Third Person Omniscient, you have liberty to describe the character at their first appearance. In this type of POV, elaborate scene setting is advantageous, so new characters should be established pretty quickly.
For Third Person Limited, you can describe the POV-character from the get-go and describe other characters in their (POV-character’s) mind’s eye!
Flaws:
Every human has flaws, and if you want your characters to be perceived as humans, you MUST give them flaws. Nobody really likes a perfect character these days; no one can connect to them. Moreso, no one forgives that mistake anymore. A good example is Superman. He is near-perfect except that he loses super-strength whenever kryptonite is nearby. Perfect characters eventually lose reader interest somewhere along the story; this is a proven fact.
Your protagonist doesn’t have to be perfect to be well received, in fact, a flawed protagonist is what your reader can connect to. Flaws create mirrored reflections in the mind of the reader, and it is this reflection they cling to, reading more of the story as it unfolds. Flaws subconsciously invite the reader to go on a developmental journey with the character: it gives the room to root for that character. They see themselves or people they know in that character. Your protagonist has something to overcome, and your readers would enjoy following his journey as he tries to do so.
Flaws don’t always have to be shown in character personality, they can also be physical—but flaws must be constructed in such a way that it has relevance to the character’s development. Make the character’s flaw relevant to their motive or backstory. The Flaw is a major ingredient in the character’s developmental arc or subplot.
Examples:
Because he’s a midget, he’s going to do what people think he can’t do.
Because he’s an amputee, no one expected him to slay the dragon.
Also, personality flaws don’t have to be big deal-breaking problems, they can also be found in the little things too, such as absent-mindedness, impatience, clumsiness, anxiety, paranoia, or gullibility. A positive trait could be a flaw too. Your character could be victim of the White Knight Syndrome or as a consequence of their past, a sufferer of Stockholm Syndrome. Use flaws to instrument consequences and developmental evolution in your story. Your character’s journey will only be believable if it portrays patterns of the Human condition.
Behavioral attributes:
This ingredient stems from the character’s background story and status quo. Like a person, we behave in certain ways owing to learned responses, genetic interplay, muscle memory, and sociocultural impact. Every important character should have distinct behavioral traits.
For instance, you could have a character with the penchant for treading his fingers through his hair: whether this is a tos a result of his chronic anxiety or childhood experiences, it becomes a dominant characteristic of this character whenever they appear.
In the book, Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte, Heathcliff perpetually shows disdain for other characters, and that becomes a part of this character’s presentation on the page. Signature gestures and mannerisms give depth to the characters and ensure that no two characters are the same, or FLAT.
These behavioral traits can also be attached to the character’s mood. You can make your character memorable by having them do a specific thing whenever they are annoyed, happy, sad, and even fearful.
A lot of things change about the main and supporting characters during the course of the story. They could encounter external factors or challenges that can change the way they think and the way they behave, but these transformations should be well thought-out and believable.
If you found this article helpful, you might want to read my other articles here.
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