Writing Realistic Characters - part 2
- Journal from their perspective. It can be hard to write compelling, realistic motivation for characters if you don’t understand them yourself. By journalling from their perspective, even if the content of the journal isn’t included in your story, you’ll essentially be thinking as the character. This should help you understand who they are and how they make choices and react to things, like a real person would.
- Answer “character questions”, but be careful when using lists found online. The internet is full of lists of questions for writers to answer when building characters, but not all of them are actually that important or useful. The fact is, it really doesn’t matter what a character’s favourite colour, animal or day of the week is (unless it’s relevant to your story... but it usually isn’t). When looking for question lists online, or making your own, focus on questions that have to do with your character’s personality, such as how they’d react to a situation or which values matter more to them.
- Make character charts! I can’t stress this enough — character charts are incredibly useful tools for writers and I don’t know what I’d do without them. They’re a great way to keep track of important information about your characters in an organized way that’s easy to access when you need to quickly check a detail. I’d also strongly recommend making your own charts, not using templates online (I find it a lot easier to stay organized when I’m using my own organizational system). If you need a place to start, though, I normally create charts with 4 categories: role (protagonist, antagonist, etc.), name, identities (gender, ethnicity, sexual orientation, etc.), and description (just a brief few sentences about them). You can also make personality charts with things like their greatest flaw, greatest strength, story goals, etc.
- Come up with a few detailed memories/anecdotes from their past. Think of them as mini-stories you can drop into your main story to build a more realistic life around the character. These don’t have to be crucial to the plot, and should be brought up in a natural way, such as in conversation with another character or in the main character’s thoughts. For example, your MC’s best friend might compliment her necklace, and she tells them how her sister gave it to her as a birthday present before moving away. You can also use these anecdotes to drop in important information in a non-obvious way. Continuing the example above, the MC could mention that her sister has the same design necklace, but in green. Later, this becomes a clue, when she finds the green necklace outside the villain’s lair.
- Keep a record of their backstory. This one doesn’t really need much explaining... Just keep notes of your character’s backstory as you come up with it so you don’t risk inconsistencies, which tend to break down realism.
- Remember that the reader can’t see what’s in your head. Your characters may be fully developed, realistic people in your head, but that makes it easy to forget that your readers don’t automatically understand them the way you do — they only know what’s on the page. Asking other people to read your work can help you understand how your characters come through to an audience, but if you don’t want to do that, just re-reading it yourself is also helpful. If you do the latter, though, go through an entire chapter at a time, the way a reader would, not small sections.
