Creating Characters You and Your Readers
Will Love
This post is later than I had anticipated
because I was buried deep in revisions on my latest book. Actually, I was buried deep
in rewrites because my characters didn’t leap off the page. The didn’t bring
their story to life. The reason why. I couldn’t envisage them as real people.
They weren’t alive in my mind, so how were they going to be anything other than
cardboard cut-outs or just silhouettes in your story?
This post is all about creating your
characters. Characters you love. So that your readers can love them too, go on
a journey with them and more importantly, believe in them, empathise with them.
How to get to know your characters
The best way I’ve found to do this,
is to ask them questions by completing an interview. You could even design your
own character sheets with all the questions you think you will need to ask and all
those you’d love to know the answer to. It’s a method I returned to during the rewrite
and I discovered some astonishing things about my characters. These are the
sorts of questions you should be answering. Here's a photo of the many sheets I used for the rewrite.
Know the basics
Find an image of
your character, something you can focus on as you write. Then fill in the
basics of what your character looks like. I find Pinterest really useful for
this, as well as good fun! This is from my board - complete with its working title - for the book I've just sent into my editor.
You also need other
information, like birthday and star sign. Find out what their hobbies are what
music they love to listen to, what type of food they absolutely love or hate.
Do they have a pet? What is the most precious thing they own and why? Some very
leading questions there. A fabulous book from which to learn more about
creating a character questionnaire, among other things, is Kate Walker’s
12Point Guide to Writing Romance. A constant on my desk!
Know your characters’ likes and dislikes
Once you’ve got the
basics filled in, it’s time to delve deeper into your new character and find
out what makes them tick. You may not
need to put in the story the fact that that your heroine is a country girl at
heart, but you will certainly know how she will react when faced with the buzz
of a big city and confident alpha male who is so unlike any man in her hometown.
Ask as many questions as you can, even if they seem incidental at the time.
Treat your characters as a new friend you want to find out more about.
It’s also important
to know how your character reacts to situations. What do they do if they are
stressed? What makes them laugh? How they deal with bad news? What makes them
angry and how they handle that? The list is endless!
Know their back story
This is what will
give your story emotional depth and is a must. Knowing their back story in detail will create
characters that are true to themselves. Every character will come to the blank
page of a new book with a past that has unresolved issues and personal
conflicts to overcome. You as the writer need to know these from the beginning,
even if the reader doesn’t discover this until much later in the story.
Finally the most
important question you can ask your characters as they tell you what has
happened to them prior to your story starting is ‘why?’ For instance if your hero lets you know he will never be able
to go to a certain part of the city, you want to know why not. What happened to
him? When? How does it affect him now? What would he do if a situation forced
him to do just that?
Know what they want in the story and why
Your characters
must have inner conflicts to resolve and problems to deal with as they progress
through your story. At the start of the story you need to know what your
characters want and where they want or need to be both physically and
emotionally as the story ends. It may be that the hero wants one thing, when
really, deep down he wants something completely different and through the
course of the story and interaction with the heroine, he will discover what it
is he really wants – and needs.
It is vital to get
to know your characters even before you start writing chapter one, as you will
then have characters that are alive and living in your story from the very
first paragraph. This is the type of character you, the writer, can connect
with as well as the reader who will be transported into the world of your
story. It’s also great fun meeting new characters and part of the writing
process I’m definitely making sure I do this as I begin my new book!
Happy Writing
Rachael
xx
Images from Pixabay
