4 Expert Ways to Create Believable Characters
Think about characters you’ve loved. Maybe you fell in love, as I did, with Alice as she tumbles down the rabbit hole muddling through her recitations. Then stumbling through Wonderland, confounded and struggling to think clearly. Or with Holden Caulfield as he blows off school and wanders through New York City, judgy and full of attitude.
We fall in love with characters we can relate to. Even if their world is completely fictional (hello, Harry Potter), their struggles and vulnerabilities are believable.
As writers, we want to breathe the same life into our characters as preceding writers have done for us. Today, I’m going to give you four ways to help enhance and create characters that are believable, relatable, and engaging.
1. Give Your Characters a Body
This sounds too obvious, but quite often newer writers (and even more seasoned scribes) leave the physical body out of their story equation. Humans experience life through bodies—through the nervous system, the senses, and our physical relationship to other beings and geographical spaces.
Writing from or into your character’s bodily experiences makes them come more alive for your reader. It grounds the story into the physical.
Let me give you an example.
If a character experiences anger, it rises first in the body. Then the character will have a reaction to their anger. They may try to suppress it—in the body. Or express it—from the body. Or any other combination.
A point-of-view character will be able to reveal the internal sensations of their body (“The blood switched directions in her veins”) while the secondary or non-POV characters will reveal themselves more through gesture, facial expression, and physical movement (“His cheeks turned red, then purple, and he sucked in all the air around us, like an ocean drawing back before the tsunami”).
There’s also how the body experiences the external world. How the character receives weather, say, or how they move their bodies through an environment.
For example, if it’s hot outside, a character may wince and find shade. They may hold a hand against their forehead, squint into the sun, fan themself with a folded flier. If it’s the POV character, you can dive deep into the sensations of heat—where in the body they feel it—sensations of sweat or thirst.
Writing embodied stories takes practice, but it’s one that helps enliven your prose. A good way to play with this is to start writing about people you meet. How they move and speak and gesture. Another is to write from your own bodily experience. Notice and then describe physical feelings and experiences as you perform certain tasks or engage in interactions throughout your day.
2. Dial in Your Character’s Worldview
There’s a famous writing prompt offered up in John Gardner’s The Art of Fiction: Describe a barn from the point of view of a man who’s just lost his son in a war—without mentioning the death or the grief.
How our characters feel and think colours the way they see the world. This means that every part of a story is filtered through a particular lens. If you tell your story from a close third- or first-person narration, every sentence must be infused with that character/narrator’s world view.
Say you have a cynical narrator. Chances are pretty good they’re not going to break character and wax poetic about the bright blue sky and all the flitting swallows. Instead, they’ll notice the vultures circling above the fir trees, and the fact that there’s been no rain for weeks. And, if they do get sentimental, their cynicism snaps back into place at the first possible chance and ruins the moment.
What if you’re working with an omniscient narrator? Or a little more distance in your third person narration?
Well, the unique world view of your different characters should come out in dialogue, physical reactions, non-verbal interactions—as well as be alluded to by the narrator.
Practice this by using variations of the John Gardner prompt above. You can change the POV and experiment with how to deliver and permeate the story with your characters’ world views and attitudes.
3. Embrace Flaws, Quirks, and Contradictions
Have you ever read an obituary? A revered mother. A beautiful lover. A beloved grandparent. Obituaries often gloss over all the flaws and quirks of our deceased loved ones and highlight their most loveable and selfless qualities. There’s nothing necessarily wrong with this, but it doesn’t make for a very believable or interesting character.
The truth is: every human—fiction or otherwise—is flawed and full of contradictions.
You don’t have to dig deep to find those flaws either. Maybe the character is chronically late, always procrastinates, or chews her fingernails. Maybe they’re deeply insecure and fumble their words.
Or maybe your character has some wild contradictions. A health nut who sneaks off once a day for a cigarette. A peace-loving vegetarian who loves cowboys. A high school janitor who sings opera as he mops the school gym.
Quirks are interesting to ascribe to characters, too. This is a detail you can make consistent through the whole story.
One of the characters in my collection was a musician in search of the “purest sound.” Any time my narrator encountered him, he’d do something related to this desire—shake vitamin bottles, ping his spoon against a cup, clank pennies in a jar.
Think about what flaws, contradictions, and quirks your characters embody. And then ask yourself how you can bring these closer to the surface of your story.
4. Understand the Heart of Your Character
One of my teachers used to say stories are all about heart. If you write a clever story, you may be missing the point. Stories need heart. I’m not talking sentimentality or romance, but a connection to longing and emotional truths.
And the best way to access heart is through our characters.
Consider what your character desires. On the surface it may seem simple. A stressed-out single mom wants time by herself. A child wants a new bike. An ogre wants to get the fairy tale people out of his swamp.
But desire goes deeper into the heart of what the character actually needs. To connect with herself. Belonging. To be seen. Whatever the desire, it usually stems from a wound in their psyche. A belief, for example, that they’re not enough, or essentially unlovable. Your job, as the writer, is to learn where that wound is and how it motivates them.
The more layered and complex your characters—and not just your protagonists—the more believable they become. You don’t need to present a psychological profile to your readers for each character, but really ask each of them what they desire and where that desire comes from and how it moves them forward.
Characters are at the heart and pulse of all stories. The more believable they are, the more invested our readers are in finding out what happens to them. So, it’s worth investing your time and curiosity into making them believable.
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Traci Skuce is a devoted writer and story midwife. Her own short story collection, Hunger Moon (NeWest Press, 2020), was recently shortlisted for the Kobo Emerging Writers’ Prize. She helps fiction and memoir writers birth and finish their stories so they can get their manuscripts out into the world.
To learn more about Traci, visit her website and join her Facebook group.