Most everyone has heard it said that there are no new stories out there, only new ways of telling the same old stories. An original and unique character in a story can be all that’s needed to give a familiar tale of love, loss, adventure, family or feuds a fresh spin.
Some characters pop into a writer’s head fully formed and full of personal details, others come to life only with an agonizing amount of work.
Character Outlines
When creating a character it can be helpful to write an outline. List all the basic facts of physical appearance, then of background, emotions and experiences. To start out, try writing down the following information about a character:
Eyes: colour and shape.
Facial features: nose and mouth – are they large or small, crooked, broad, narrow, etc. Is the face itself round, narrow, square? Does the character have a baby-face, look older than they are?
Hair: long or short, curly, straight, falling into the face, bangs? What colour is the hair?
Body type: tall, short, in between; thin, emaciated, average, round, rotund, chubby, etc.
Physical gestures: does the character talk with his hands, have a facial tic, blink a lot? Does she play with her hair, bite her lip, tap her foot?
Clothing: does this character live in jeans and wool sweaters, wear heels with sweatpants, have perpetually rumpled shirts, go nowhere without a tie?
Speech: how does this person talk? Does she have an accent? A soft, hard-to-hear voice, or a booming shout? Does he speak a lot, or keep his thoughts to himself?
Continue in this way, adding information that might be useful. Perhaps stories about the character – specific incidents in his or her childhood, a conversation with a friend, the reason they hate the colour orange – will also come to mind.
Many of these details will not be listed or outright described in the story. However, it is the writer’s job to know such details, to know more about the character than the story itself presents. This allows the writer to know and understand the character intimately, which in turn allows the writer to build an intimate connection between the reader and the character. If the reader cannot understand and sympathize to some degree with a character, the reader will lose interest in the story.
Communication With the Reader
Information that is not stated outright will still come through in the story. This is the tricky part for the writer: keeping all the information in mind in order to form strong and interesting characterization. At the same time, the writer must be choosy about which details are given about a character, or the story will be flooded with too much information.
Take, for example, a character named Beth. The writer knows that Beth wears only organic cotton clothing that has been hand stitched and coloured using natural dyes. The reader may not be told this, but if the writer does his or her job properly, the character will come across as fussy, or environmentally conscious, or perhaps it will be noted in the story that the character owns few articles of clothing, all of which are well made and distinctive.
A middle aged man named Dave always hums show tunes while he’s driving. The writer knows that this is because Dave’s father hummed show tunes while he drove, and Dave subconsciously picked up the same habit. But the writer has decided that the important detail in the story is what Dave hums while driving, not why he hums. So the writer knows more than the reader does, but the reader still understands the important fact that Dave is the sort of man who hums, and who knows old show tunes.
Have Fun
It’s easy to enjoy creating new characters, and it’s also beneficial to enjoy it. If a writer is interested in his or her characters, that will come across and help the reader to be interested in them. If the writer finds his or her characters flat and boring, chances are the reader will too.
Natalia Heilke - Natalia Heilke is in her final term of a creative writing degree at the University of Victoria. Her focus is on short fiction, but she ...
