Writers read. I believe we learn to write by reading. I enjoy reading books where the characters seem to be real people. Not every book has characters like these. Some characters are such two-dimensional stereotypes you couldn’t care less what happens to them, or how the book ends.
When the characters seem to be real people, you come to care about them; your emotions become involved in their imaginary lives. Their world comes alive, their problems seem real to you, and you care about whether or not they reach their goals. They make you want to come back and visit their world again. Even though you know how the story ends, you will reread the book just to enjoy the characters and the world they inhabit. These are the sort of characters you want to put in your book.
The question then, becomes how to create the sort of character your readers will want to hang out with. Human beings do not like “perfect” people. Knowing that we, ourselves, are imperfect, a “perfect” person makes us feel smaller and inadequate by comparison. Your character should not have a perfect appearance. Allow their hair to be mussed up. Let them wear wrinkled, torn, or stained clothing on occasion. Make them fall down and skin their knee. Let them have the imperfections real human beings have. Lieutenant Columbo is probably one of the most beloved detective characters of all time, yet you never see him when he is not wearing that horribly wrinkled trench coat. The suspects always seemed to underestimate him because of his rumpled appearance.
Don’t let your characters be emotionally perfect, either. Let them be angry, let them struggle to keep their composure when in a bad situation. Allow them to feel fear. Heroes are not people who are never afraid, they are ordinary people who feel fear and stick to their task anyway. In the Harry Potter book Order of the Phoenix by J. K. Rowling, Harry spends most of the book in a state of extreme anger, to the point he nearly alienates his best friends. If this book had come first in the series, the readers would not have stuck with it to the end. However, by that point in time we knew this was not typical behavior for Harry, and we were concerned for his well-being. During the final showdown scenes in all seven books of that series, the reader is made well aware of Harry’s fear, yet in true hero fashion he presses on and wins the day.
Although weaknesses are important, none of these imperfect qualities should be taken to extremes. No one can remain angry or fearful all the time without going stark raving mad or driving their friends away. A reader will simply not want to spend time with someone who is always angry, fearful, or an ineffectual wimp.
Characters, then, need to be pretty much like regular people. They need to have qualities we admire, as well as a weakness as we can feel sympathy for. The main character of your novel needs to be strong enough to solve their problems and wise enough to know when to ask their friends for help. Their weaknesses should be balanced by their sidekicks’ strengths.
Every novel needs a villain. The villain should not be stronger or smarter than the hero, nor should the villain be weaker. Your hero and your villain need to be fairly evenly matched, even if it appears in the beginning the villain is stronger; otherwise the victory will come too easily to one side or the other.
As a general rule, villains work alone, or with a host of fairly weak, order-taking toadies. If you had two strong villains, they would fight each other for dominance before going after the hero. Remember when you are matching the strength of your villain and your hero; you are matching the villain plus his toadies against the hero with his allies. The hero by himself should be somewhat weaker than his opponent, but he must be able to succeed with the help of his friends.
One tool which can be very helpful in determining these qualities is the use of personality tests. There are many different tests available both in books and online, and although they give different names to the personality types, they all seem to divide people into four basic groups. My personal favorite is The Color Code by Dr. Taylor Hartman, which concentrates more on a person’s motivation rather than their behavior. The four basic motivations for the personality types can be summed up as; “I want to rule the world”, “I want to help the world”, “I want to party”, and “Just go away and leave me alone”. Remember, most people will have some qualities from each area of motivation, depending on their mood and the events of the moment. However, they will not stray far from their main motivation, especially when in crisis.
Understanding the motivation of your characters is vital in making them “real” people. A villain who is mean to others for no reason will not be as believable to the readers as a villain who is mean to others because he was abused as a child. A murderer who kills for fun is a psychopath, and isn’t very interesting to read about, while someone seeking revenge for the murder of his father has a motive people can understand and believe in.
Your hero’s motivation is very important. Why is he stepping in to save the day? Is it his job? Is he motivated by patriotism? Did his mother teach him not to ignore a damsel in distress? Does he simply have a “saving people thing”? The better you know your characters, the more real they will seem in your own mind, and the more real they will become to your readers.
During the writing process, I often have conversations with my characters, both within the confines of my mind and aloud. I have a background in drama, and give a different voice to the character than the one I use for myself. Don’t mistake this for a blurring between the lines of reality and fiction. Talking out loud to my characters and giving them voice to speak back to me is a tool I use to round out their personality in my mind before putting pen to paper.
Location has very little to do with character traits. People are people, no matter where they are. Whether your story is set in medieval days, an alternative history timeline, contemporary earth, or the far future on some distant planet, human beings are going to have the same motivations and interactions among themselves. If your characters are not human—for example if they are animals or aliens—a goodly number of them need to have human characteristics, motivations, and interactions or the book will not be easily accepted or enjoyed by your human audience.
I like to use a spreadsheet to keep track of my characters. I have columns where I track their name, gender, personality type, physical description, relationships with other characters, occupation, and basically what they’re doing in the book. I don’t try to figure out everything for each character before I start writing, but I do add to the sheet and try to keep it up to date as I go along. I try to make sure I don’t have any two characters whose names are so close to each other that they are easily confused. I don’t give my characters names which are hard to pronounce, because most people hear the words aloud in their head even when reading silently, and I don’t want the reader to have to stop every time to try to remember how to say the name. Any fact about a character such as eye or hair color, height, weight, etc., I put into the manuscript, needs to end up on the sheet. This helps to keep me from changing someone radically in the middle of the book.
I habitually use an excel spreadsheet for my pre-writing activities and keep it open but minimized as I write. I use one page for my timeline of events and another sheet for my character sketches. Additional sheets can hold other background information, history, calendars, monetary exchange rates, or anything else which is needed, yet kept within the one document so references back to any information sheet required during writing is quick and easy.
Some authors keep track of their characters on index cards, post-it notes, or just in their head. None of these methods are wrong. The important thing is that you do keep track of who your characters are and what their purpose in your book is. Don’t put characters in your book without some purpose. If they don’t advance the plot, remove them. If you really like the character but they just don’t fit here, then use them in another book. Simply remember to give them a reason for being in your book.
This lesson’s challenge: write at least three character sketches. Make each one at least three paragraphs long. Describe the character as though you were introducing them to your parents. If you run out of things to say, try asking them what they want said. You may just be amazed at what they tell you!