“The goal, I suppose, any fiction writer has, no matter what your subject, is to hit the human heart and the tear ducts and the nape of the neck and to make a person feel something about the characters are going through and to experience the moral paradoxes and struggles of being human.” Tim O’Brien
This is Part Three in a series of posts focussed on the process of writing your first novel. Here’s where you can find Part 1 and Part 2.
Writing relatable, real and dynamic characters can turn a poor story into a book that pulls readers in, opens their eyes and steals their hearts.
It’s about creating a lasting connection with characters we love.
But, it needs to be more than that. As writers who create compelling characters, we need to know the people in our stories down to their core and understand how to flesh them out in the pages of our books.
Readers everywhere love to read a book that draws them in – where they feel like they see glimpses of themselves as part of the hero’s journey. They get it when hero messes up and they relate to that. They cheer the hero on when they get back up and try to win.
So how do we get to know our characters so well, they come alive for our readers?
How to Really Get to Know Your Characters
When we first start our story, we have a glimpse of our characters as part of our first idea of what we want to write for a story.
We probably have the beginnings of what happened in their backgrounds and in their families that took them up to the point where we want to start our story. We might even know the tragedies they experienced, unforeseen events that happened in their lives or the bad guys that tried to ruin them.
This is the stuff that’s important to know about your characters. BUT you don’t want to begin your book by bogging your reader down with backstory. What happened to to your character in the past needs to wait until you’re closer to about a third of the way into the book. This is the mistake I made when I wrote my first book until an editor looked at it and said this was backstory and I needed to wait to put this in the book a little later. So I changed it so the reader would start the book by feeling like they were right there in the moment with the main character.
To establish an emotional connection between your character and the reader, you need to write what is happening right now.
You can really get to the heart of your character by asking questions like: What is the character thinking and feeling? What is the character saying? What is the character hearing and seeing? Are there other things happening in the scene that are important … that the character is experiencing?
So how do you really get to know your characters well?
Here’s steps I go through to get to know my characters
1. Listening – As the story idea comes to you really listen to your instincts and intuition about the characters that you are seeing and hearing. Often I’ll have an image of the characters in my head and I’ll get an idea of their personality and their goals. Honestly this is part where all the ideas come – is the funnest part of writing. You feel like you seeing the movie of your story in your head and it’s like you’re sitting on pins and needles wondering how the story is going to play out. A amazing book that helps you create killer characters that reader’s love is James Scott Bell’s book Write Great Fiction – Characters, Emotion & Viewpoint
This ‘simmering of ideas’ can take place for months and at the very beginning of this phase, I try not to over analyze. I just let the ideas come as they come. Just let your subconscious do what it wants to do. Don’t try to plan what kind of character would be good for a story, or what your plot should be for your book to be amazing, but just let your subconscious do what it does best…. which is to come up with ideas.
This is also where you write a short summary of the story, like we talked about last week. Also right here, it’s a good idea to name your characters as soon as you can, because names do influence the characters’ personalities.
2. Searching – Sometimes it’s helpful to cast your characters. Assign a flesh and blood person(actor or actress or someone you know) with similar looks or mannerisms that you see in your mind’s eye. It’s fun to do and helps you to remember your characters much better.
Sometimes its hard to find just one actor to make up your character. That’s okay, just take the looks of one and put it with the personality of another…. or just find what works for you.
3. Organizing – When you are read to start writing your story – after you’ve done your initial story summary – write out an outline, or a sketch of what will happen in each chapter. If you’ve listened to the SelfPublishingPodcast, you’ve heard Sean talk about creating story beats. This is a shorter version of a detailed outline. You might want to do that later. A great book that helps to make outlining simpler is K.M. Weiland’s book Outlining Your Novel: Map Your Way to Success.
Sidenote: When I wrote the first draft of my 1st novel, I didn’t use an outline. I had a bunch of stuff written on sticky notes, but no outline.
And for me that didn’t work too well once I got to the middle of the story. You might do great as a pantser(someone who writes the story without an outline), for myself I’ve discovered I like to write the first few chapters, get an idea as to what the ending will be and then after that I’m ready to outline. Experiment. Try Plotting and Pantsing or something in-between and then do whatever works the best for you.
4. Interviewing – Once you have a sketch and a basic plot idea, then you get to interview your characters. There’s many questions you can ask about the characters that so far have just been floating around as a movie in your brain. Ask stuff about when they were born, what they look like to deeper questions like what their deepest regrets are and their defining moments.
By asking all kinds of questions, you get lots of detail about your characters. You learn what drives your character to accomplish their goals, why they are the way they are and what fears hold them back. It’s also where you figure out the small details like colours, pastimes, favourite foods, etc. Not everything will show up in your book but it’s great to have these details in the back of your head as you’re writing because every little fact influences who your character is becoming.
If you’ve gone through all of that then you’re basically ready to start writing the 1st draft of your story. You have your story idea and know the path your characters will be walking.
Be prepared though. Even with all this preparation under your belt, the first draft never really turns out exactly as you might have planned. It’s only when you start writing your story from your hero’s perspective and you get to hear her/his voice that you really start to understand them. So you need to just let go and let your characters talk to you. Let the ideas flow. Give the story space to evolve and the characters room to grow and become who they’re supposed to be.
So that’s a little glimpse into my process for developing characters. I hope that helps a little.
Next time we’ll dig deeper into character Point of View.
I’m curious. How do you get to know your characters? I’d love to hear your ideas in the comments.
