You can’t tell a good story without a well-crafted character. That’s just the long and short of it. If you have flat characters all throughout a story, you will never be able to convince someone to love the work that you’ve done. Now, I’m not saying you can’t have flat characters, but your main character should be as dynamic and thought out as your day-to-day choices.
But how do you make sure you have a character that is believable and relatable and enjoyable? There are several ways to do this, but many of them require more time than you may be able to space during this month as you run towards 50,000 words. So here’s what I’ve done, and what I’ve always recommended:
Think like your character for a few hours, or for a whole day.
I can hear you already, “Ugh, don’t I already do that when I’m writing my character?”
Yes. You do.
What you don’t do is imagine your main character is your BFF wandering the real world with you. Every time you make a decision, think about what your character might do in the same situation. When deciding to eat out or cook at home for dinner, ask what your character would prefer to do and then do it.
When you get dressed, when you plan a route to school/work, when you’re doing chores, literally anything that you do! just think about what your character would do instead and go through those motions. This will help you understand how they think at a deeper level. You might even surprise yourself along the way since you’ll be putting your character in a real-world scenario.
This will also help you think about your character’s quirks. What unique details make them super loveable and extremely annoying? What makes them tick and stand out from the people around them. As you discover these details, you can put them onto paper/the screen as you are telling your story.
I tried this with a character from my 2017/2018 projects. This female character is very calculated, brash, and diplomatic with everyone around her. She only opens up to one or two characters over the course of the two books, but even then she does so with a plan or purpose in mind. Whenever I interacted with other people, I tried to be more intentional and mindful about the impression I wanted to make, and over the first few days, I was already learning that this made my character hard to relate to because everything with her was surface-level at best. She needed to have something make her real somehow, and I found that in my head this woman is a fighter. At the end of the day in every manuscript, she fights for what is right. So I learned as I was trying to embody her that she would be a combatant voluntarily. As I told my story, I added some scenes where she would be practicing her swordsmanship. This also helped explain a relationship she had with another character more effectively by adding another layer to the storyline I was trying to tell with them.
It is also worthwhile talking to someone that you trust about realistic scenarios your character might run into that are too trivial to include in a manuscript. This helps you build a personality around them. Would your character use an iPhone or a Samsung? Would your character listen to music while working or do they prefer silence? Are they a meat-eater or a vegan? These things will likely never come up in your story, especially if it’s something set in the past like my Nanowrimo projects were, but it lets you build traits into who they are, and you never know – it might end up giving you an idea that does make it into your story.
For example, I shared a scene from my manuscript with my best bud. She made a comment about the relationship between two characters. It was a joke, but I couldn’t ignore it after she’d said it. As we continued making jokes about these two characters, I started making changes to every scene these two shared. Eventually, the entire plot of the story was impacted by this joke.
Now I can’t imagine my novel ever existed without these changes.
So, in conclusion, it would benefit you greatly to explore the nitty-gritty things about the characters you’re crafting in your manuscript. It might seem silly, but there is nothing of greater value, I can assure you. Once you learn what makes your character tick in daily life, you’ll learn what pushes them through your plot too.
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