Crossover post! My Top Three Tips for...Creating Characters who Feel Real
i.e., actually helpful ways to think about character development
If there’s one thing that SheWrites.com, an online community for women writers, loves as much as I do, it’s helping folks fulfill their dream of finishing and selling a book. So I teamed up with them to bring you a monthly dose of expert advice.
Every month, I’ll choose a topic and share some of my top tips for honing your craft or making it in the publishing world—half here and half over on their site. Check out the post below, and then head to SheWrites.com for the other half of the post!
(Pssst: Check out the first installment, on crafting beautiful sentences, on She Writes and my Substack, here:)
Crystallize your Before and After
You know the journey you want to take your main character on, I trust—be it from Follower to Leader, Selfish Dillhole to Caring Person, or Loner to Lover, or something else altogether. And this is great! Showing (not telling) us what a [follower/dbag/whatever] that character is on page 1 helps us get to know their character, and we’ll love tracking their steady personality glow-up throughout the book.
Your plot, as you know, will be the Rube-Goldberg Machine that sucks ‘em inside in their Before form and then spins/spirals/bounces/balances/boing-oing-oing-oings them around and spits ‘em out the other side as their exciting After. As you’re thinking about your main character, ask yourself: How can I make the person on either end of the journey as different as humanly possible?
Hey, there’s a reason Walter White starts out as a high-school teacher, not a low-level criminal. Likewise, by the end he’s worked his way to the top of the food chain, not some middle-management BS pushing paper for Fring (though, would watch).
Or take Ebenezer Scrooge—when we meet him, he’s not a boring dude who doesn’t really care about the holiday season either way; no, he’s a world-class dick. And by the end, he isn’t begrudgingly giving his underlings some well-deserved PTO. Instead, he is donning a Santa hat and hosting a community dinner and singing along with a fuzzy collection of frogs, pigs, and unidentifiable monsters (wait, that wasn’t in the book?).
How can you stretch apart the Before and After to put your own protagonist through an equally dramatic transformation? (Bonus tip: Remember, additional characters can have journeys and end up changed as a result of the action, too!)
Know how different characters speak.
I got this tip from my friend Megan Collins, whose thrillers (including the dual-POV Thicker Than Water) are always so fun to read: Keep a running list of quirks and verbal tics for different narrators (or different main characters) so that they’ll sound distinct. Characters should have wildly varied senses of humor and go-to ways of forming sentences; they’ll have pet words (haven’t you ever had a phase where you kept using the same word? Like the Dems rn with weird!) and tendencies that show us who they are, like the bossy character who’s always speaking in demands, or the timid character who poses everything as a question.
Another tip for nailing the distinct voices in multi-POV stories: Read a pass for every character, jumping to only their perspective, and edit for consistency.
Choose interests and hobbies judiciously.
It’s very easy to write an entire book where your character…isn’t into anything. Or they’re into whatever the book’s about (solving a mystery, getting the guy, etc.), but that’s kinda it. When we read books like this, the protagonist feels like a nonentity, a cardboard cutout moving from spot to spot. (And hey, sometimes, this is the goal—witness the gaping hole where Bella Swan’s personality should be in the mega-bestselling Twilight series, so readers could plop themselves inside that vacant avatar. Do you!)
Giving your characters interests makes them feel real, like they’ve had a whole life before the story began. Hobbies hint at a complicated inner world, a distinct kind of dimensionality. Because, unlike our girl Bella Swan, we’re all into something. Even if you’re 23 and your only hobby is partying (ahem, The Lost Night), you’ve still got Your Thing: being with your friends, say, and cultivating effortless indie-sleaze cool. Heck, your whole bag could even be hiding from the world and watching old episodes of The Price Is Right. Consider how much more intriguing someone is if I tell you they love: boxing, reading, karaoke, being a music snob, whatever.
Now, don’t just splat a few Likes on a protagonist like stickers; give your characters two or three core hobbies that align with their flaw and journey, and reference them throughout. For example, in The Spare Room, Kelly loves cooking for other people…because she’s a gold-star people-pleaser who puts others’ needs above her own and only sees value in a wife/mother/nurturing friend role. (Obviously this is not the case for everyone who likes cooking—please don’t @ me—but it works for the story.) What hobbies tell us more about your main character’s personality and values? When can they talk or think about their key interests in a natural way?
This trick has a bonus: Whenever you’re not sure where to set a scene (especially if it’s gonna be an exposition dump), you can plop them inside their hobby-world. Learning key info during a roller-derby practice is going to be way more interesting and memorable than hearing about it while they ride the elevator.