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HowtoCraftCompellingCharacters Privacy - Terms

By: David Corbett | April 12, 2011

28

The source and exact nature of the curious phenomena we refer to as characters remains
something of a mystery, but the craft of characterization is not.

Although its clearly a cause for celebrationor at least reliefwhen a character appears in the
minds eye fully formed, the reality is that for most of us, this is a rare occurrence. Certain
techniques are required to will our characters to life. We need to draw on the unconscious,
memory, the imagination and the Muse until our characters quicken, assume clear form and, with
hope, begin to act of their own accord.

Can this processso inherent to the success of any novelreally be condensed into a single
method? In my experience as both writer and writing instructor, the answer is, to some extent,
yes. The key is first to understand what your characters require from you in order to come to life,
and then to determine how you can draw on your best available resources to give them what they
need.

CHARACTERISTICSOFCOMPELLINGCHARACTERS

The most compelling characters are those who appear internally consistent and yet are capable of
surprise. In my own work, Ive found that the art of crafting such fully realized characters can be
boiled down to four crucial elements: a driving need, desire, ambition or goal; a secret; a
contradiction; and vulnerability. Lets take a closer look at each one.

ADrivingNeed,Desire,AmbitionorGoal

The fundamental truth to characterization is that characters must want something, and the
stronger the want, the more compelling the resulting drama. This is because desire intrinsically
creates conflict, the primordial goo in which character is formed.

Take, for example one of the most memorable characters in American literatureBlanche Dubois,
from Tennessee Williams A Streetcar Named Desire. At the start of the story, Blanche has lost her
family home and has been left with nowhere to stay. Desperate, she has come to New Orleans to
find her sister, Stella, and ask to be taken in.

This is a perfect demonstration that simply by giving the character a deep-seated need or want,
you can automatically create conflict, for the world is not designed to answer our desires as easily
as we might hope.

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ASecret

For your character, a secret is that inclination or trait (such as a psychological disposition to
dishonesty, violence, sexual excess, or the abuse of alcohol or drugs, to name a few) or an
incident from the past that, if revealed, would change forever the characters standing in her
world, among co-workers, neighbors, friends, family, lovers. Secrets inform us of what our
characters have to lose, and why.

Drawing on the example of Blanche Dubois, her secret is that through drink and illicit sexual
liaisons, she has become so emotionally and physically dissipated she could not hold on to the
family home.

We are our own best source for understanding secrets. We know our own, and if were insightful,
we understand how they affect our behaviorspecifically, how they make us afraid.

AContradiction

We all know people who are both shy and rude, cruel but funny, bigoted but protective. This
complexity, which seems to particularly manifest itself during times of stress or conflict, is what
can make a person inherently unpredictable, setting the stage for the kind of surprising behavior
that can keep readers enthralled, wondering what might happen next.

Our senses and minds are tuned to focus on irregularitiesthe thing that doesnt quite fit, doesnt
make sense, or is simply changing. This is an evolutionarily adaptive trait; it helps in analyzing the
environment for threats. But it also attunes us to whatever is unusual in what we perceive;
contradictions reveal what we couldnt predict, the enigma, the surprise.

Again, lets look at how this applies to Blanche Dubois: She is desperate and weak, hopelessly
vain, with an alcoholics capacity for denial and delusionbut she is also fiercely proud and
resourceful with a surprising steeliness. Its contradictions like these that can automatically pique
a readers interest.

Vulnerability

Nothing draws us into a character more than her vulnerability. When people appear wounded or in
need of our help, we are instantly drawn to themits a basic human reflex. We may also
sometimes be repelled or frightened, but either way, the fact of the matter is that injury to
another person instantly triggers a strong response.

Obviously, vulnerability may be the result of the characters secret: He is afraid of being found
out. Or it may come from the intensity of his need or wantbecause, as we all know, desire can
render us naked in a fundamental way. For your character, the ambition and focus inherent in a
strong desire can imply some form of inner strength, while at the same time rendering the
character vulnerable to being deprived of what he most wants.

Blanches desperation to find a safe place makes her vulnerable, as does the tawdry nature of her
secrets, which threaten to shame her beyond redemption if revealed. In other words, needs or
desires, secrets, contradictions and vulnerability are almost always interconnected.

METHODSFORDEEPENINGCHARACTERIZATIONS

Often our characters first appear to us as we flesh out the idea for a story. But characters who
emerge from story ideas can often be flat or two-dimensional; this is because at that early stage,
they serve the purpose of filling a role, rather than acting as independent beings with needs and
fears and affections and concerns outside
the story.

Compelling characters are not cogs in the machine of your plot; they are human beings to whom
the story happens.

Some stories begin with the characters, of course, and the narrative emerges from an exploration
of their needs, their defenses, their secrets and contradictions, or some problem they face. The
trick in those cases is making sure the narrative doesnt meander, creating, as writer Philip Larkin
called it, a beginning, a muddle and an end.

But more often in mainstream fiction and especially genre fiction, the novel begins with a story
idea, and the characters need to be fleshed out to keep them from being stock players in the
drama. We might wonder how many uniquely memorable world-weary detectives there can be, for
exampleand yet every year at least one more seems to emerge from the wave of crime novels

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11/21/2016 HowtoCraftCompellingCharacters|WritersDigest.com
crashing onto bookstore shelves. It takes skill and insight to breathe life into stock characters,
something too often dismissed by those who disdain genre fiction as inferior.

So how do we flesh out our characters when they arise from the needs of our stories, or when they
otherwise lack the specificity, uniqueness or power necessary to engage a reader (or the writer)?
The best inspiration often comes from within usand from our experiences with the people in our
lives.

RealLifeCharacters

Near the end of his life, John Updike wrote a poem titled Peggy Lutz, Fred Muth, in which he
thanked his childhood friends and classmatesthe beauty and bully, the fatso and others
for providing a sufficiency of human types all a writer needs.

Whether we know it or not, our minds and hearts are populated by all the characters we will ever
needthough we may disassemble them and rearrange the parts into composites for variation.

To fully tap this potential, begin by reflecting upon the following real people in your lifejot down
their names, fix them in your mind, remember a few details about their lives, their physical
appearances, the effect theyve had on you, and anything else you think would be important if you
were to describe them to someone who didnt already know them.

Include in your exploration:

A family member you feel particularly close to
A family member you particularly dislike, or from whom youre estranged
Your closest friend from childhood with whom youve lost touch
Your closest friend from childhood with whom youre still in contact
A stranger whose path crossed yours this past week
A person you know personally and admire
A person you know personally and fear
The love who got away
The love you wished had gotten away
Your first love
Your greatest love
Your greatest childhood nemesis
Your greatest adulthood nemesis
The person from childhood who annoyed you the most
The person in your present-day life who annoys you the most
Your favorite neighbor
Your least-favorite neighbor
Your favorite co-worker
Your least-favorite co-worker
Your postman or someone else you deal with on a business level daily
An older person who has inspired you
A child who fascinates you
Someone for whom you harbor a secret crush or feel sexual attraction
Someone you believe has a crush on you
A person who believed in you
A person who thought you would never amount to anything
A person whose life you would never trade for your own

The list can go on, of course; its limited only by ones own inventiveness. But writing out such a
list provides a larger cast of characters than we originally might have realized we possessed. We
can sometimes unwittingly get into ruts, writing variations on the same character over and over
the overbearing parent, the needy lover, the insufferable phony, the lonely aunt. The value of
using people we know to inspire our characters is that we already see them so vividly and
specifically.

EmotionalTriggers

Of course, we know a great deal about the people in our lives, but we dont know everythingand
this is why real people provide excellent but not perfect source material for characters. We will
also have to draw on our own lives, at least as a starting point, to fathom a characters inner
world.

It often surprises me how frequently writers, especially young writers, fail to explore the rich veins
of emotion they possess in their own lives, so they can translate that to their characterizations.

The most important emotional incidents to explore in a characters lifeand ones ownare:

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THE MOMENT OF GREATEST FEAR: This is perhaps the most important emotional trigger, because
almost all of our limitations, failures, frustrations and disappointmentsand thus our secrets and
vulnerabilitiescan be traced back to or relate to some fundamental fear.

THE MOMENT OF GREATEST COURAGE: This may be physical valor, moral isolation or simply
persisting in the face of some dread.

THE MOMENT OF GREATEST SORROW: Think of death, grief, loss.

THE MOMENT OF GREATEST JOY: Its strange how nebulous moments of joy can seemand what a
loss. At what stage in your characters life (or in your own) did the golden moment occur? Whats
happened since?

THE WORST FAILURE: Ouch, I know, but dont shun this moment; from a writers point of view, its
golden (as are all our travails, sorrows, embarrassments and screw-upsembrace them).

THE MOMENT OF DEEPEST SHAME: Shame is connected to self-image, and this moment will be
when that image was seriously undermined in a particularly personal way in front of others.

THE MOMENT OF MOST PROFOUND GUILT: This involves some violation of a moral code. It may
also make us ashamed, but guilt involves having knowingly done something wrong.

THE MOMENT OF MOST REDEMPTIVE FORGIVENESS: If youve been forgiven for some serious
wrong, its not likely youve forgotten it. Its permitted you to regain your place with some crucial
loved one.

When performing this exercise, my students sometimes get caught up on trying to think of the
greatest such moments. Dont fall into this needless trap. Instead, think merely of one moment
(presumably of many) of particularly strong impact in any one category.

Obviously, plumbing your own life will not provide access to the whole of your characters inner
lives (unless your characters inhabit the same world you do). Rather, these moments provide
touchstones, points of access to begin the exploration into similar moments in your characters
livesa necessary but not sufficient precondition for a compelling portrayal.

Each of these triggers a vulnerability or a secret, perhaps a desire, maybe even a contradiction,
depending on context. By envisioning these scenes in your characters lives, after first exploring
them in your own, you gain key insights into the formative episodes in their emotional lives, and,
with hope, begin to see them more vividly in your minds eye, the better to render them on the
page.

The key is to intuit the character so distinctly she seems capable of acting on her own volition.
Once this happensand as I said at the outset, its a mystery how or why it doesyoure capable
of beginning the dialogue that will form your story, asking your character: Where are you going?
Why? How will you get there? With whom? And who will you have become when the journey is
over?

Learn how to create strong characters, craft believable dialogue & get the
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11/21/2016 UsingMyersBriggstoCraftCompellingCharacters::Bibliocrunch

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Home(http://bibliocrunch.com/) News(http://bibliocrunch.com/category/news/) Interviews(http://bibliocrunch.com/category/interviews/)

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byAuburnSeal(http://www.auburnseal.com)July12,2016Follow(http://twitter.com/)
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Whencreatingacharacterthatyourreaderwillconnectwithandbecomeinvestedin,itsimportantforthemtofeellikerealpeoplewithreallivesthatmatter.Doyou
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thesepersonalitytypes,youfindtonsoffodderforyourbelovedfictionalcreations.Heresanexample.

ThisismyMyersBriggspersonalitytype:ENFP

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YoucanseebylookingatthisimagehowtostressoutanENFP.Ifyouwanttogiveyourcharactersomeconflict,sprinkleinafewoftheseandwatchthemsquirm.

Forexample,IcouldwritearomancewherethemainfemaleprotagonistisanENFPthatisenergeticandindependentandcreative.Icanwritescenesforherthat
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 NaNoWriMo Cheat Sheet:
Character
Development
Worksheets
by Victoria Lynn Schmidt, PH.D.

Writers Digest

91 Week 1
Character Worksheets
The Mighty Oak was once a little nut that held its ground.
Anonymous

OBJECTIVES

Create a Character Story Sketch to help you remember little de-

tails about all of your characters.

Create Character Snapshots for your main characters that help

you to add depth to them.

Think through your Character-Revealing Scenes in order to have

interesting scenes ready that you know will reveal deeper aspects
of your characters.

DEVELOP YOUR CHARACTERS

While the Book in a Month (BAIM) 30-day plan is all about getting down the plot
(thats why we do the plot outline first), characterization is still extremely impor-
tant. It doesnt matter if you are writing a character-driven story or a plot-driven
one; the plot is still what you are focusing on when writing quickly. Character-
driven pieces just have the characters driving the plot forward.
Many writers like to map out their characters before they start
writing, while others like to wait until they have written a little of
the story and gotten to meet their characters before mapping them
out. The following worksheets represent a middle ground of sorts
allowing you to think through certain aspects without going too
deep too early in the writing process. What I have created here are
three distinct worksheets that will help you get to know your charac-

92 Week 1
ters better and help you plan for and chart their growth throughout
your story:

Character Story Sketch: This worksheet helps to bring out those

elements that relate to the plot as well as the standard biographi-
cal elements. For example: Sara is a tall brunette with a few ex-
tra pounds and whole lot of confidence.

Character Snapshot: This worksheet provides a quick overview

of your main characters and expands on the story sketch infor-
mation, revealing more depth about the psychology of each char-
acter. Under Trauma, for instance, you might write: Sara was
abused as a child.

C
 haracter-Revealing Scenes: This worksheet allows you to out-
line the possible scenes that will reveal each of the categories
in the Character Story Sketch and Character Snapshot work-
sheets regarding the main characters. (You can use the scenes
you have listed in your outline if you want to and add elements
to reveal the main characters.) For example, a scene that relates
to the characters Trauma might be: Sara watches as the
woman in the store hits her daughter. Her muscles tighten. She
just cant contain herself, not after what she went through as a
child. No. She has to speak up!

Do you see how this works? Create a Character Story Sketch to get a
handle on the basics of who a character is. Use that information to go
a little deeper and come up with a more precise Character Snapshot.
Then use the information from your Character Snapshot to complete
the Character-Revealing Scenes worksheet by taking each topic area
from the snapshot to come up with different scenes to reveal this in-
formation. In each box, write a possible scene you could have to reveal
the main character. You dont have to use these scenes, but if and when

93 Week 1
you get stuck, you will have some great scenes to fall back on.
Lets say that as you brainstorm for the Psychology/Trauma sec-
tion of the Character Snapshot, you decide your heroine was attacked by
a dog as a kid. When you get to the Character-Revealing Scenes work-
sheet, you can choose to write in the Scenes to Reveal Trauma section:

When the heroine tries to confront the villain in Act II, a large dog wanders into
her view and she freezes in silent panic, giving the villain a chance to escape.

Now, isnt that a much better way to give the villain a chance to es-
cape than just arbitrarily having the villain escape by some other
means? This way, you have come up with something that also reveals a
bit about the heroine in the process. How do you think she will feel af-
ter he gets away now? Much worse than if she really tried to stop him
and he got away without any real fault or failure of her own.
Or you could write in the Scenes to Reveal Trauma section:

If needed, the heroine could be forced to confront several guard dogs to fulfill
her objective or achieve a secondary goal.

If you find you need something to keep the story moving forward, you
can look at the Character-Revealing Scenes worksheet and decide to
add a guard dog to the scene and spice it up a bit.
Think about Harrison Ford as Indiana Jones and how his character
cant stand snakes. It really adds a lot to several scenes when he must
do something to save someones life while confronting his fear of snakes
at the same time. It also helps make his character feel more human.

94 Week 1
 Character Story Sketch

Story title Character name

Age Ethnicity Height Weight Hair Eyes

Education Residence Job Archetype Birth Sign Religion

Style of Dress

Distinguishing Marks

Favorite things

Music Food Color Pastime Entertainment

Just the Facts

Children

Pets

Hobbies

95 Week 1
 Family Secrets

Worst Fear

Greatest Hope

Skills

Prized Possession

Vulnerability

Regrets

General Outlook

Going Deeper
Describe the first impression this character makes.

Describe how and why other characters view this character.

Describe what this character needs to learn by the end of the story.

Describe how you will foreshadow this ending in the storys beginning.

96 Week 1
 Character Snapshot

Vital Statistics

Name

Nationality

Age

Family Situation

Appearance

Quirks

Psychology

Traumas

97 Week 1
 Feelings About Settings

Overall Attitude

Fears

Joys

accomplishments

Skills

Weaknesses

Awards/Degrees

Dreams/Ambitions

98 Week 1
 motivations

Top Priorities

Favorite Things/People

Obsessions

Guilts

character arc

Lessons to Learn

Intended Character Changes

important notes to remember

99 Week 1
Note: Remember that you have in your story not just a protagonist, whose goal is
shaped or informed by who he is and where hes been, but you have an antagonist,
whose goal is in conflict with that of your main character. At the moment, having a
clear understanding of what your villains goal is will be enough to keep your story
moving in the right direction. But as you write, youll come to understand more of
who your villain is and what parts of his own life have pushed him toward this goal.
Rather than trying to map out the villains upbringing, likes and dislikes, or per-
sonal tragedies now, taking up valuable writing time, keep a blank character sheet
handy and make notes to yourself as more of your villain is revealed to you.

Character-Revealing Scenes
Scenes to reveal Scenes to reveal quirks:
appearance:

Scenes to reveal characters Revealing scenes for: Scenes to reveal skills/

lesson: weaknesses:

Scenes to reveal motivation: Scenes to reveal trauma:

For more great advice on how to write a novel in 30 days, check out
Book in a Month: The Fool-Proof System for Writing a Novel in 30 Days

100 Week 1