Creating Believable Characters

Wow, good question. One thing I do is look at what a character's strength is, and then see how that strength can be a weakness if used in the wrong way. To me, having believable flaws helps make a character feel real...

One of the most important things about good characters that Heinlein taught me was that they are people, and therefore will occasionally do the wrong thing altogether, or do nothing at all even when they should do something. That by itself, that bit of irrationality, can change the whole shape of a story for the better.

I definitely write characters differently for different mediums.

For comics, for example, I worry less about physical mannerisms and more about how they speak. And since they have to, by nature, say less per sentence, I have to make sure they come across a lot differently. Comics rely less on what a character SAYS by itself and more how it CONVERSES with those around it.

With short stories, it depends wildly. Sometimes, they don't speak at all. Sometimes they talk to much without actually saying anything.

With novels, you got me...

show the strengths and weaknesses, through actions/reactions, which includes dialogue. What they say and HOW they say it are just as important as whether or not they lie to their best friend or why they always put on the left shoe before the right. Any little detail can really make a character stand out, if it is the right kind of detail. It can really define that character.

For instance, one of my daycare kids acts out for attention in a unique way--when the other kids aren't giving her enough attention, she grabs a toy that they didn't care about and says "You can't have it." Guess what? They want it--talk about your manipulation! She then has them following her around demanding to have what she has and they get into an argument/chase. It stands out as part of her personality.

Melanie

Nine times out of ten, I come to read about a character's weaknesses ripping him down, and stay to watch his strengths building him back up.

I agree that all characters need flaws in some way. Also, I don't believe that main characters should be type-cast. I also find it really important that my characters have a history, even if it never gets mentioned in the book. There has to be a reason why they are the way they are.

Hmmmm… for me, the answer depends partly on what type of story I’m telling at the moment.

Part of the reason is because I feel that every genre and medium has its own particular character stereotypes and ways that have already been done to death as far as making a character sympathetic.

Like, for example, the detective with a drinking problem or broken marriage, or the geek being bullied or who wants to go to the prom with the cheerleading queen or the housewife with the overbearing husband and self-centered, barely controllable kids who take her for granted.

Since these have been used so often, we have to create new characters that a reader will be able to sympathize with, identify with and find interesting enough to follow to the story’s end.

So, as an example, instead of an alcohol-ridden divorced detective, I might make him a teetotaler (non-drinker) who the other patrolmen can’t stand because since he doesn’t participate in their nightly after-work revelries (and also because the Captain loves him), they think he’s a stuck up asshole kiss-ass.

And he’s raising a kid with Down’s syndrome alone because the mother, whom he met and “knew” after a night out at the bar, couldn’t handle it and blamed him for sleeping with her that one night and causing this child to come about and she generally blamed him for ruining her life and so she split soon after the baby was born.

Or the teen is a geek, a true whiz and genius but he’s not a socially inept outcast. In fact everybody likes him. He’s a pretty average guy who uses comedy to get people to like him and it works except that’s part of the problem.

Girls only “like” him. He suffers from the “Buddy Syndrome” - where girls only like him as a friend and don’t see him as boyfriend material or feel sexual desire towards him. Not only that but his heart burns for the goth chick who HATES everything and anything normal. And he’s about as normal as they come- but he can’t help his attraction to her. He must have her!

I also think it’s important that there be a symbiosis between the two: the character and the story. They have to complement each other. Twist the character and often, the new character will add even more conflict and drama to the story.

By this I mean: let’s say you have a mystery. Well, make the detective in love with a high school goth. Or make the geek have to solve the murder. Etc.


Overall though, I think, the most important thing is to create characters that a reader can SYMPATHIZE with, IDENTIFY with and ADMIRE or find INTERESTING enough to follow.

If you can evoke these three things, you should have a pretty good character.

SYMPATHIZE:

One way to get the reader to sympathize with the protagonist is to show them as the underdog or having to face adversity in some manner. Whether it’s an asshole boss at work, a bad home situation, her having a bad hair day, being late for a job interview, they’re an orphan etc.

Another way to get the reader to sympathize is with a flaw.

Alcohol, depression, drugs, self-loathing, any kind of crutch. It shows the character is human - BUT it’s important to somehow show the reasons why the character is like this, so the reader can sympathize. You don’t want the reader to be contemptuous of your character.

ADMIRE, BE EFFECTIVE

One of the most important things is to not make the character ineffectual. They have to be effective. They have to be able to take action and propel your story forward.

The reader has to subconsciously admire your character, be willing to follow them.

One way is with a “Pet the dog” moment. Where the protag does something kind and admirable. Sticks up for an underdog. Sticks to their principles against material gain. Fights the good fight against all odds. Follows their dream. Something the reader will admire.

Another effective way is to show the protag as especially good at something. Either their job or even a hobby. If you show them excelling at something, anything – readers will subconsciously admire that about them and it will add to their attraction.

Make them interesting. They get the best lines, do wild and outrageous things. They act like someone you’d see at a party or something and say “Wow – check that person out. They’re… different.”

You can also show that they’re cool or interesting through other’s reactions to them. If other people treat them with respect, the reader will take the cue that this person is worthy of respect etc.

IDENTIFY:

To get the reader to identify with your protag, you have to have them do things others will be able to recognize and identify with. Some of my favorite characters have been the ones who’ve caused me to sit up and say: “A-ha! I’ve done that! I’ve been there, brother!”

It can be something basic like showing a facet of everyday life, but I think the most poignant ones are the ones the writer pulled from deep down within themselves.

Those embarassing moments you wouldn’t even think of revealing face-to-face can make your protagonist seem so real.

That time you walked around with a glop of food on your chest.
Or the time you told a girl how you really felt and she laughed.
Or the emptiness and the inevitable questions you asked yourself after that 20th rejection letter.
Or walking in on your parents having sex and how it grossed you out so much.
Or the time you slept with that girl and then avoided her for weeks afterwards and didn’t answer her calls and felt like such shit afterwards.
Or the time you thought you were pregnant and couldn’t eat and were a total wreck.

I think you have to dig down deep within you. That’s where you’ll find the hidden well to dip from. The one that will make your characters resonate with others.

Because when they read them, they’ll see that they’re human – just like them. With all the good and bad parts we all have within ourselves. And that will make them believeable.

brokenfingers said:

One way is with a “Pet the dog” moment. Where the protag does something kind and admirable. Sticks up for an underdog. Sticks to their principles against material gain. Fights the good fight against all odds. Follows their dream. Something the reader will admire.

Another effective way is to show the protag as especially good at something. Either their job or even a hobby. If you show them excelling at something, anything – readers will subconsciously admire that about them and it will add to their attraction.

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Wow. My main character's traits are that he has no talent (other than his scathing wit) and he hates the world and the world hates him. Guess I'm screwed.

Anyway, really good post. Although I have no idea where my characters come from, other than that they come pretty much fully-formed, this is basically a laundry list of everything I look for in good characters I read. I will be referring to this in the future. . . .

Daydreaming. That's where they come from. I get a "what-if," think up what someone might do in a situation, make it more difficult for them by making them near-incapable of fixing said situation (flaw) and let the games begin. After a while, they tend to wise up and get a clue. Strengths appear where they didn't know they had them.

I try to create characters that I care about. If I care about them, the readers will. Even my villains, I find something about them that makes me interested.

I also try to make my characters somewhat unique. If I go for a stock character and make arbitrary decisions about how she behaves, I tend not to care what happens to her, and neither will the readers. I sometimes read things and can tell that the author did a character outline and at some point decided that his character loved donuts. Seems too contrived and boring.

I go about it quite organically, actually.

I've never consciously tried to create a character so I don't know how that process works. However, I just write as I see them in my head and I try to convey their feelings, actions just like I would if I were transcribing a movie or writing a detailed observation note. I try to look for everything: flaws, hopes, aspirations, guilty secrets. For some reason, I tend to do really well with villains (that's kinda scary). Then again, I'm writing in the romance field so the main characters usually have set types people expect. Still, I refuse to have the ditzy heroine jumping to wrong conclusions constantly, and instead of a big, hulking, 'alpha male' stereotype, my hero is an elegant, noble male, quietly powerful, but physically doesn't make the heroine feel small. I see that a lot in romance. Petite heroines and huge heroes. My characters are about the same height, though he's physically stronger, but not a giant warrior. I try to show personality traits as I see them, especially moments the other characters may never see.

I'm just rambling here. Carry on and ignore this post.

My characters tend to pop into my head - well, not quite fully formed, but at least somewhat complete. One thing I've decided is not to worry if some of them develop personality traits that seem contradictory - for instance, my favorite female MC is normally painfully shy, but isn't easily bullied - and her nastily conceited ex-boyfriend wasn't quite smart enough to realize she was being sarcastic when he was trying to mock her.

As others have said, I think having believable flaws -- and not making too many excuses for those flaws -- is key. Your characters should seem three-dimensional, not victims of circumstance. And definitely let them have interests and thoughts that don't necessarily play into your plot; one character of mine, out of nowhere, announced that she loved country music, something I rarely listen to. But figuring out why she loves it has ended up telling me a lot about her.

Creating characters is the thing I think I am best at. Pulling them through to the end of a story sometimes is my weakest link. They usually appear fully realized and I just have to write them down...but if they give me trouble I write diary entries as them...I slip into their skin and write entries while borrowing their bodies. I write the entries from say 10 years prior to the story I'm writing, or 5 years after the end of my story. I like to flesh out their back story this way...have them tell me, through their diary entries, what kind of people they are. It's like getting the dishy stuff from the horse's mouth. It's a little like being a body theif, but they're my characters...they don't seem to mind.

Sometimes the problem is, your characters appear fully formed and then because of what they know and can do...they solve the story's problem right off the bat.

Very awkward.

I love writing the characteristics of my fictional people most of all in a story, my WIPs are always character driven, so I concentrate on thier good and bad points. Like KTC said earleir, I also invent pasts and futures for my characters too, even if I don't actually use them in my stories.

I've always been a person who likes to watch and listen to people and find out how their minds work. I've also been psychoanalyzing myself since I was in my twenties, so that kind of thing helps me write better and believable people, I think. I sometimes use little bits of myself for my characters, bits of me that I don't show to other people, or bits of my own personal history and then I embroider heavily around the edges. I also use personalities from people I know personally or have pieced together out of characters in films.
At the moment, I have a great character who likes to laugh things off, or pretend that the bad things aren't happening, when she's frightened or worried, she baffles the hell out of the bloke who's interested in her.
I have another character who is a lovely middle-aged woman who takes care of everyone around her, she's taken from the personality of one of my best friends, but in real life, this best friend of mine only has days to live and will never get to read about herself I will be dedicating my book solely to her.


Elodie

Remember a character has a life before the story, and a life (if he's not dead) after the end. They all have hopes and wishes and desires and wants and needs. They are not necessarily likable -- at least according to common criteria. They are not perfect, and you also can't force them to do things against their personalities, hopes, wants, and needs.

On my long drives, I think about them, and they "talk" to me about who they are, what they want and how they want to get what they want. Knowing that, I get insights into my character's life -- before, during and after the story. And the more I get to know them, the more real they become. It's just in real life -- the more you know about someone, the more real they are, and not just a collection of assumptions and expectations.

Thanks for that post, brokenfingers.

I'm seriously questioning my protag's first entrance into the story for exactly those qualities - is she interesting, likable, sympathetic? - so will look at her first scene with your words in mind.

I definitely feel that characters should be flawed. I can't stand it when I read a novel or watch a TV show in which the main character is perfect. And not just personality-wise, but looks-wise. It's much more interesting when characters have something wrong with them or just simply don't have much faith in themselves. Then as the story goes along, the main character should "grow" as a human being, learn something.

And I try to write dialogue that is realistic. I think writers need to develop a good ear for dialogue. Listen to the way people really speak. On many TV shows, the characters speak too eloquently, in perfect sentences. Real people don't do that. Since a character's words define who he or she is, it's really important to choose the right ones.

And the other thing is to make sure a character's actions make sense for that person. If you've made it clear that a certain character is either shy or bold, whatever they do in the story has to be true to that person or else readers will say, "Oh that doesn't make sense. She wouldn't do that."

For me creating believable characters is not only making them imperfect, but having realistic dialogue. When I read dialogue that I can’t see any man or woman saying the character development starts to crumble. I listen to guys talk to each other and to women, along with being aware of how women communicate. I try to incorporate this kind of dialogue, based on location, in my book.

The flaws in my characters are intertwined with past and present actions, yet I try to keep their personalities likeable. One of my protagonists is a typical guy flawed by reckless decisions and past mistakes. Keeping in line with his flaws, my character changes his bad habits and grows through the book. So he has a dark past, but enough good to accept change for the better. At least this is what I am attempting to do in my book. When I hit a roadblock I read books by writers I admire to put me on track.

Most of my characters just are. They present themselves mostly formed and challenge me to tell their stories effectively.

Some characters are based on real people. I use a lot of dead relatives, for example. My dad. My grandparents. My great-great-aunt who I never knew existed until I was in my mid-30s when my mother mentioned her to me in passing.

I also use people I haven't liked IRL. Former bosses. Former co-workers. Ex-neighbors. People I've observed in passing and studied because they're just ripe for writing about.

As a former actor I tend to study my characters a long time before writing about them. Last night, for example, I wrote the beginning of a flash piece based on my late grandmother and her best friend. I know these women. I can smell my grandma's meatloaf and see her friend's pink putter pants. I know how they interacted because I witnessed it many times. I can hear how they speak in my head. In my writing I just extrapolate from that which I know and fly with it.

I don't worry about planning specific flaws or foibles unless I need it as a plot device. Usually they just happen.

I do worry about naming my characters correctly and that influences who they are greatly. I research meanings of names with care. I look for names that fit characteristically, socially, regionally, historically, and so forth.

Getting a visual sense of a character is vital to me too. Only once have I actually done a drawing of a character I was writing about, and it was terrible, but it gave me something to work from and that's what mattered. Photographs are very useful too. But mostly I go from the picture in my head and write a description for each character as soon as I see them. They just appear sometimes and I will write the description of who I'm seeing and have no idea where or what they'll fit in, but I file them away carefully because losing track of them is unthinkable.

I highly recommend acting lessons if you have trouble creating characters that are real enough to believe. I learned to observe people and situations very differently while taking basic acting classes and I was amazed when I began writing seriously how helpful all that seemingly useless hooey turned out to be. Being able to crawl into the skin of my characters, even briefly, allows me to present them better. Also what I learned about discerning a character's physicality is incredibly useful. Sense memory exercises are great for creating characters too because they teach you, as actor or writer, to relate your own experiences to that which you wish to depict. Getting into the actual physicality of a character brushing his teeth can show a reader who that person is. Do they brush in a specific pattern, very methodically? Or is their brushing haphazard? Do they floss? Or rinse? Do they use their own toothbrush or someone else's? All these things demonstrate the who and what of a character, whether you're performing the physical action in front of people as an actor or writing about it in a story. If I hadn't done that exercise where I had to plot out every single physical movement within a scene in acting class, I don't know if I'd understand why it matters how someone holds a glass or lights a cigarette.

For example, the following is from a story I wrote quite a while back.

Behind the slightly shabby farmhouse, Guthel and the other men took long pulls from the jar of moonshine being passed among them. Fluidly, Guthel took a wooden match from his front shirt pocket, drew it across his callused thumb, the nail sparking the flame with which he lit the cigarette hanging from his lower lip. Without bothering to put out the fire, he flicked the match up in the air. He watched its arced flight and the man holding the moonshine skittered out of its path.

By focusing on Guthel's physicality, location, and behavior I (hopefully) give the reader relevant information about who he is.

I have no idea if any of this is helpful, but it's what I do and how I do it. It's hard to describe, really. Most of the time my people just happen. Like magic. As if I really do have a muse whispering in my ear and placing pictures in my mind's eye.

Cat Scratch said:

I try to create characters that I care about. If I care about them, the readers will. Even my villains, I find something about them that makes me interested.

I also try to make my characters somewhat unique. If I go for a stock character and make arbitrary decisions about how she behaves, I tend not to care what happens to her, and neither will the readers. I sometimes read things and can tell that the author did a character outline and at some point decided that his character loved donuts. Seems too contrived and boring.

I go about it quite organically, actually.

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You are so right, kitty Cat!
To me, there is NOTHING more important than having your reader CARE about your characters. If I don't give a crap what happens to a character, why in the heck would I read the book? I read one of Marge Atwood's books and hated it because I could not have cared less what happened to the main character.

The most I ask of my characters is:

1) What do you want?
2) What are you prepared to do to get it?