The best characters in any novel feel like they're about to leap off the page. Readers are attached to them. They cry when they die and they want to know what happens after the book ends (provided there is anyone left alive at the end of your novel!). Good characters are living, breathing people in the hearts and minds of both writers and readers. Creating these characters takes practice and patience, but there are a few little tips that can help you out.
Make Your Characters Do Something
You can describe your characters until you're blue in the face, but a character doesn't truly become real, especially to readers, until he or she begins doing believable things. To decide what is and is not believable for a certain character, you'll have to do some thinking. You'll have to get to know your character, come to understand how he'll react to the situations you'll be throwing at him in your novel.
Readers are very good at spotting mistakes in this area. As they get to know the character, they'll know when that character is doing something that character would never do. Perhaps you have a cheating boyfriend in your novel. He's been sleeping around for years and suddenly decides not to go home with the woman he just met at the club. This guy, the one who's been sleeping with anything with legs, is suddenly loyal to his girlfriend when nothing has happened to trigger this change? I don't think so. People change, but they don't do it instantly, and usually there's a triggering event. If the boyfriend is suddenly monogamous, you're readers will be jolted out of the story and certainly notice your character is not behaving the way he ought to.
Your characters need motive. Think about your own life. How many times to do you something completely without reason? Everything we do has a reason, even if that reason is just to alleviate boredom. So give your characters motive, and have them react as if they were fully fledged people standing in the room with you, and you're halfway towards creating a believable fictional character.
Give Your Character Flaws and a Past
No one is perfect. Some of us are just quirky, some are a little annoying, others truly have a dark past with skeletons in the closet. We're all a product of our past, and your fictional characters should be the same. Most of our flaws come out of experiences we've had in the past. So do most of our strengths.
So before you can put pen to paper, you have to understand your character's past. How does that past shape who he is and how he will react to any given situation? How was he raised? Has he had any traumatic experiences in his life?
You might not think this important, but it really. In my first book, one of my lead characters was born and raised a prince (remember, I write fantasy). He was born to command and to one day become Emperor. He was confident and intelligent and rarely flustered. And he was used to everyone doing exactly as he told them, no questions asked. So when a little slip of a girl won't obey him, it throws his world into chaos. This man seriously cannot handle disobedience, and this trait goes on to influence how he reacts in books 2-5 of The Imperial Series. His past rules his present, and this should be true of any character you create.
Good Characters Have Layers of Personality
Think about yourself for a moment. Think about how you behave when you're around different people. You, like most of us, have different faces. You're one person with your parents, another with your lover, and still another with your friends. This isn't deception and it isn't multiple personality disorder. It's just that we all have different facets, and we show these facets to different people.
People are complex. This means your characters should be complex. The character I mentioned earlier was at points in the books the concerned and obedient son, the exacting Crown Prince, the loving husband, and the domineering father. His wife isn't necessarily dealing with the same facet his children have to face.
Do this with your characters. Make sure they all have layer upon layer of complexity. This will make them more real to you, and so to your readers.
All of these things come together to create fully believable characters. Make sure your characters act "in character" and that they have motives for everything they do. Have their past influence their present and make them as complex as real people and you're sure to have characters your readers will love and remember.
Dialogue in a novel occurs whenever a character is speaking. Usually, this character will be speaking to another character, but sometimes he might be having a conversation with himself or merely speaking aloud. Maybe he's just talking in his own mind. But if you're indicating exactly what was said (or thought, depending on your story), you're using dialogue. This dialogue should sound like something is actually speaking. At least, most of the time.
Creating Believable Dialogue That Doesn't Annoy
Pay attention to conversations around you. Listen to how people speak to each other. How do you speak to your closest friends? We're actually very boring, and sometimes downright annoying. I'll give you an example. The other day, I was in a coffee shop listening to people talk. Two friends sat down at the table next to me and the following conversation took place.
-- "Hey."
-- "Hi."
-- "How're you?"
-- "Okay. You see Idol last night?"
-- "Yeah. It was ... like ... umm ... lame. You know?"
-- "Lame. You goin' to Jim's later?"
-- "Don't know. Did he restock the beer?"
The conversation went on from there. Completely inane, as are most of the conversations we have during the day. These conversations might be accurate, but they'll bore your readers to tears. Dialogue must be natural, but don't write exactly what you and your buddy might say about the situation. Cut through the inane and get to the heart of the matter. Forget all the little bits and share what's important.
Once you have the heart of the conversation fleshed out, you want to make it real and accessible. Do this by eliminating endless exposition. In other words, don't let any of your characters sound like walking infomercials. Yes, it's tempting to use a single character to explain everything, but he starts to sound like an encyclopedia. Make his conversation natural and normal, not bookish (unless that character is completely bookish, in which case you can use this character for a lot of things, including humor).
Finally, clean up the speech. Most people are not illiterate and they don't talk like movie gangsters. If you do have characters that don't speak as well as everyone else, indicate this sparingly. Every word doesn't have to be garbled. Remember that your readers want the story, and having to puzzle through dialect and illiterate speech will detract from that.
Be Careful With Dialogue Tags
You have to let your readers know who's speaking. There are three ways to do this. The first is dialogue tags. Use them only when necessary, and avoid getting fancy. A simple "Arianna said" is usually sufficient (if the character is named Arianna!). If the character is actually mumbling, you might choose "Arianna mumbled" or another alternative tag, but if you use these alternatives constantly, you'll look like an amateur. Keep it simple when using dialogue tags.
Don't use any tags if you can get away with it. This is where the second method for indicating the speaker comes in. You can make the dialogue distinctive enough that no tags are necessary. For example, I have a character who constantly says "It's not fair." She says it a lot, and she's the only character in the book who ever says it. No tag needed. I have another character who has a different native language than everyone else. This results in odd phrases and you always know when he's speaking.
And then we come to the third method. You can use action and description to indicate who is speaking. For example:
Crawling slowly to his feet, Payton just shook his head. “Doesn’t matter. We’re not doing this.”
No dialogue tag, and the dialogue itself doesn't really tell you who might be speaking, but you know it's Payton because he crawled to his feet and shook his head. This is my favorite method because I can accomplish two goals. I can tell you who's speaking while I describe what he's doing.
Writing believable dialogue is a bit of an art form. You'll have to practice until you get it right. Read a few well written novels, then sit down and get to work. If you can master the nuances of dialogue, you'll be well on your way towards writing a novel readers will love.
The most basic element of any story is the conflict. And this conflict generally arises between the protagonist and the antagonist. Two characters (at least, they're usually two separate characters) whose goals are at odds and who tend to butt heads. The antagonist tends to be harder to create than the protagonist, and if you do it wrong, you'll lose readers faster than my son loses his Legos.
What is an Antagonist?
Before you can create a good antagonist, you have to understand what exactly an antagonist is. On a basic level, the antagonist is the bad guy. This is the person who gets in the way of the protagonist (the good guy). The antagonist is the reason (or one of them) the protagonist doesn't get what he or she wants. Sometimes the bad guy is a direct threat to the good guy, but sometimes not.
Your antagonist can take many different forms. Usually the antagonist is a separate and distinct character intent on doing the protagonist harm. Other times, he or she will simply get in the way, foiling the plans of the good guy (either intentionally or by accident). Occasionally, the antagonist is not its own character, but a part of the psyche of the protagonist. This is rare and not all that easy to do, so unless you've been practicing, don't do this.
Creating a Believable Antagonist
One of my biggest problems with most novel is the haphazard way in which the bad guy is treated. The good guy (and all his buddies) get to be fully-formed characters, but the bad guy exists as a two-dimensional chunk of mud. If you want me (or anyone) to read your work, you need to put just as much effort into creating your antagonist as you do any other character.
Start by understanding exactly what the role of the bad guy is. Most bad guys don't have to carry the weight of the story (unless your antagonist is also your main character). The protagonist lurks in the background, waiting to get in the way. This doesn't mean he (or she, but I'm going to stick with he) doesn't have to be as real as anyone else in your story, but it does make your job easier if you don't have to worry about him on every single page.
The key to creating a realistic antagonist is to give him a story. Why is he the way he is? In my first novel, Arianna's Tale, the bad guy (who happened to be a girl) was the way she was because she was horribly jealous of her brother. This jealously drove her to destroy everything he had. She wasn't born evil, but her father was so focused on her brother, and her brother was so focused on anything but her, that she slowly slid down a very slippery slope. And ended up dead because of it (but that was at the end of the novel, of course).
In my second novel, the bad guy had originally been a good guy. But he was hopelessly corrupted by an even worse guy. That antagonist also died. Antagonist three was a man whose biggest failing was his attitude toward women. His father had raised him to believe they were nothing, not worth the ground they walked on. This attitude eventually led to his abusing the wrong woman. Women, actually.
And in my fourth (and current) novel? The antagonist is a woman, an enchantress. Except that she'd not exactly real. Instead, she's a construct, a creation whose sole purpose is to carry out the bidding of her master (who we won't meet until book five). But she's innately curious, and this actually helps the protagonist get out of a rather nasty situation.
The point is this: your bad guy (or girl, as the case may be) must have a story. There must be a reason for your antagonist to act the way he does. Most antagonists weren't born bad. Most of mine certainly aren't. Maybe the exception is the construct, but only because she was created by a bad guy. So when you're creating an antagonist, make sure they have a history and make sure you at least allude to that history. A good antagonist (ignore the oxymoron) will be more than just a bad guy. He will have a unique history that has made him who he is.
You might think there are no rules in creative writing, especially when it comes to writing a novel, but you'd be wrong. Of course there are rules, but these rules are more like conventions that help the reader understand and connect to your work. You can break these conventions, but doing so requires a firm understanding of them.
Beware of Stereotypes
We all know the stereotypes of both literature and film. The damsel who never contributes anything but needs constant saving. The evil dude wearing black. The ditsy blond. The idiot sidekick who is absolutely hilarious in his stupidity. These and many others are the stereotypes of storytelling.
Stereotypes have their place, but it's not in most literature. The exception is humor. If you're writing comedy, you might want to make use of exaggerated stereotypes. It can be funny to read about the ditsy blond or the sidekick who can't get anything right. If your hope is to induce laughter, literary stereotypes might be the way to do it.
If you're writing anything other than comedy, avoid stereotypes at all costs. There are a few instances where you might be able to make use of the black hat stereotype, but most of the others are out. Stereotypes are like cliches. Used right and sparingly, they can enhance your story. Overuse them and you're certain to turn off even the most determined of readers.
If you want to use a stereotype, try changing things up a bit. Perhaps your good guy wears black and walks around with a scowl on his face. Or maybe you have a guy who needs to be rescued by the beautiful damsel. By playing with the stereotypes you'll create greater depth in your characters and enhance your story.
Bring Out the Flaws in Your Characters
Everyone has flaws. You, me, the mailman, all of us. So one of the rules of creating fictional characters is that no one can be perfect. The exact flaws are many and varied, but every characters must have at least one flaw. Maybe the character in question has a fiery temper, maybe he never looks before he leaps, or maybe he's afraid of commitment. Whatever. But he needs flaws.
Once you have these flaws worked out, show them to the reader. Let your readers see these flaws, and consider exaggerating them when necessary. Not to the point of silliness (unless you're writing comedy), but enough that your readers don't for a minute think the character is perfect. Avoid the stereotypical traits (redhead with fiery tempers as their only flaw are really quite annoying), but flaws are what will make your characters come to life.
It's All in the Name
Naming your characters is an important thing, but there aren't a lot of rules regarding the names you choose. You can name your characters anything you'd like, but there are some conventions you might want to stay away from. Don't use anything obvious, such as naming the guy who's going to betray everyone Judas. Don't use the name Jezebel for a woman who is a false prophet or for someone who will eventually become a prostitute. Too obvious.
Play with names until you find something that fits. And don't let anyone tell you that you shouldn't use a name because it might offend someone. If you do that, you'll never be able to name any of your characters. Someone somewhere in the world will have that name, and that someone may possibly be offended. Choose a name based on your character, and don't worry about what people might think.
If you're worried that a close friend or family member may be offended by the use of their name, change the spelling. Vicki can become Vicky, David can become Daivid, Jamison can become Jamyson. This works especially well for speculative fiction (such as fantasy or science fiction), but odd names work in just about any genre.
Think carefully about your fictional characters and consider everything from names to personality traits. Your job as an author is to bring your characters to life. To do this, follow the most basic of rules and fill your characters with believability.
