The backbone to any good story is the character narrating it. They are the unique individuals who experience your story events personally, it is their thoughts you are listening to, their perceptions you are taking in, and their mind and actions you are delving into.
The key to making any good story is to have characters you can bond with. With whom you can walk alongside during the entirety of their journey in the story. With whom you find yourself endeared to, because you appreciate them so much, because you can relate with them, or if not that, then very well understand them.
And this is not solely limited to the protagonist of a story, but it even extends to the antagonists, and even the supporting characters.
The key to knowing whether your character is well-developed or not is questioning whether their presence is essential to the storyline or not. That is, if they are removed, will the story continue without pause and effect? Essentially, it should not be so. Your character must be integral to the storyline, without whom, the story cannot progress further.
For a reader further still, your character should prove to be one they can bond with. With flaws and little quirks and habits that make them seem all the more real. The key here is to write them in a way that your readers wish they were real.
Below are some tips which helped me in developing fictional characters and making sure that they have fleshed-out personalities:
Firstly, for me, I need to give my character a name. I know, it might sound weird for some of you, and that’s okay. You don’t even need to adopt this method, but give it a try, see if it helps.
As I mentioned, giving the character a name is a beginning step for me. I’m already very interested in onomatology i. e. the study of names, so this makes sense to me.
I believe that a name can define and outline many character traits; the name may hold a meaningful history, it might even hold a meaning that defines key traits of the character, the name may even present a contrasting and conflicting image to the character, and the name may also even show which family and income class the character belongs from.
Of course this all depends on your story, but I believe naming your character should be the first step.
After you name your character, you don’t need to imagine their appearance first, that particular step is yours to implement whenever you choose to do so. The next I believe is forming your character’s personality.
This is where most of the trouble lies, as the personality is the main thing a reader wants to see. A tip to forming the personality which I find very helpful, is basing your character off an existing personality. This helps you, as a writer, in imagining the end portrayal of your character.
For example, when writing about a mystery novel, you may base your main character’s personality by having him possess the same disregard for life as Sherlock Holmes from the popular BBC show does, but it is a result of a tragic upbringing where the character spend most of his childhood like a shy, abused teen akin to how Harry Potter was in the first book.
The above was just an example of how you can form your character’s quirks by envisioning them as possessing personality aspects from existing individuals from the creative literary culture, or even real life identities.
Your character must possess flaws. This cannot be stressed enough. Everyone likes a character that seems more relatable, simply because they make mistakes or have certain undesirable aspects to their personalities that seem familiar to the reader.
What’s more, don’t just explicitly state the flaws in your character. Show it to your audience.
They need to see with their eyes, how flawed a character is. They need to see from their own eyes, the character’s eyes, and even from the eyes of the supporting point-of-view in a story.
No one likes a character who remains stagnant and does not grow as an individual through their experiences in the story.
Therefore, it is essential to show character development throughout the course of the story, showing how the character overcame certain conflicts and came out of it a little bit different, growing as an individual.
As an avid reader myself, there is nothing I like more than characters with proper development and growth shown throughout the story.
Having a third neutral party evaluate your writings about your characters is extremely helpful, as they might provide insight upon certain things you may have missed.
You are human too, and well capable of making mistakes or even missing something. So there is nothing to be scared of when you ask for help. You might end up getting constructive criticism which will only help you make sure your character is well-developed and well-liked or disliked, depending on what your end-goal for that character is.
I hope you would find some of these tips helpful, as these are essential for both the writer and reader to make them see the characters as an integral part of the stories.
Comments
Post a Comment