Writing

The Craft of Writing Fiction: Characters (Part 1)

In any story you have a few elements that are vital.  Obviously, the first of these elements is the character.  This can be anything from a cast of lovable folks to an anti-hero you don’t really like but want to succeed or it can even be someone so absent from a story that all you know is they’re telling it.  A character can be a human, alien, a sock, or anything you can imagine but they cannot be dull or flat.

Characters are so fun to write but they’re difficult to create sometimes.  People tend to categorize people and that can bleed into writing, and as a result, you get boring or stereotypical or cookie-cutter characters that aren’t overly exciting.  Now, as we talked about in earlier articles, some people can just start writing and be good to go while others need to map out their literary journey and the same goes for characters.  

Copyright: Sergey Nivens – Fotolia

While, again, it’s dealer’s choice in how you map out your cast, it’s important to read a lot of character-rich fiction, or just fiction in general because you are better able to pick up on tropes that bleed into the lives of your characters.  It’s fine if you have a character that loves football or is the “popular girl” or who is nerdy or who may be a space pirate or whatever, but their personalities need to go beyond the norm for these types of characters. Simple quirks or traits can really set people apart and make them more real.  Don’t settle for ideas of what a type of character is like, make your own recipe and bake a unique character to your style!

A great example I remember from a textbook in college is to simply know your characters.  For instance, if your character is a shoe then s/he would know a lot about floors and carpet and socks and pavement or even grass or turf but very little about clothes or the sky or food, etc.  Or, if you’ve got a space pirate running around doing stuff, make sure you’re not writing Han Solo fan fiction if you want something truly unique. Maybe you have a vampire who loves sweets or a detective that’s narcoleptic or something along those lines, but the point is, give these people real-world traits/problems/flaws and you’ll find your story all the richer.  

While a strong story and deep characters are so very unique, a weak set of characters can hurt a strong story a great deal.  A famous author (I’m too lazy to Google who it was) once said, “Don’t be afraid to kill your darlings”, and this is great advice as you write and edit.  Sometimes in order to make stronger characters it’s important to edit or kill them off and start anew but you must be willing to improve upon any character you create.  Your story may depend on it.