As an avid fiction writer, I’ve been developing characters for novels and PBEM games for more than ten years. I also run my own fiction tips, tricks and writing website. As a general rule, there are two ways to write a novel; plot driven and character driven. My favorite has always been character driven. However, character driven is slightly harder to accomplish. As a writer, you have to know your characters before you ever put them on the page. Here’s how you do that:
1. Write your character’s biography
Think about your main character and write down their name. Write down their occupation. Write down their likes and dislikes, goals, dreams, hardships. What do they want out of life? What are their immediate problems? How did they grow up? Who were their parents? Write it all out as if you were writing a biography. Do this for all your main characters. Minor characters don’t need this kind of detail.
2. Write down what your character looks like and how they dress
You can put this at the end or beginning of your biography. Does your character wear jeans, a business suit? Does he or she have any tattoos, scars? What’s the character’s eye color, hair color? What is your characters ethnicity? Write down all the physical attributes of your character.
3. Write down any physical and mental weaknesses in detail
Does your character limp, have a medical condition, drink, do drugs? Think about your characters weaknesses and write them down. Every character has to have a weakness. It makes them more human to your readers.
What is your character good at? Where does he or she excel? Is your character a decorated cop, an accomplished thief, a martial artist? What skills make your character awesome at what he or she does? How did he or she learn them?
5. Write down where your character lives
What city does your character live in? Is it the same city in which he or she grew up? If not, why the change? Does your character live in a house, an apartment, condo, their car? Does your character like living there? This is going to give you a good idea of your character’s socioeconomic status and further ideas about how your character thinks and behaves.
Once you write down answers to all of these questions, you should have a very good understanding of your main characters and what drives them. You should also have a clear understanding of how they’d react in most situations. It’s also going to give you a good understanding of the setting in which your character lives, and some of the plots surrounding your character.
For further reading, I recommend:
Writers Digest Books, “Writers Guide To Character Traits”, by Linda N. Edelstein, Ph.D.(2006)
Writers Digest Books, “Characters, Emotion, and Viewpoint”, by Nancy Kress, (2005)
