Creating Characters in Fiction

How do you create a memorable character? Think of people you remember: the girl with the mismatched socks and purple and aqua streaks in her hair, the man with scorpion and rattlesnake tattoos, the old woman wearing neon pink and walking her Yorkshire terrier with a rhinestone collar and pink glitter leash. I recently saw a woman with a sequined tether for her cell phone that matched the handle of her purse. She became a minor character in a manuscript I’m currently writing.

Strangers make good characters. You don’t know their stories, and you can make them up and animate them. One of my characters came from watching a woman roller blade in a city park. Another character came from sitting in an airport listening to the announcements and thinking about planes that never arrive. Many writers find inspiration in public places. I like to write in coffee shops because the background noise helps me to shut off my internal chatter. A wide array of characters come into retail establishments, and you can make up stories based upon snippets of conversation— eavesdropping is a great way to get ideas. Always carry a moleskin or small notebook with you or you can take notes on your phone.

When you are writing a character sketch, you need not spend a lot of time on physical description unless it is relevant to the story. If you read literature from the early 1900s, you’ll notice a lot of attention to what the character is wearing, the décor of the room, and the specifics of the setting. In modern fiction, writers rarely devote a lot of time to this. Exceptions may include speculative fiction or fantasy, science fiction or futuristic writing where unusual clothing or setting can summon another world, and romantasy, a genre that combines romance and fantasy.

Character-driven stories focus more on emotion than plot. Much of literary fiction involves a rich backstory and a compelling character arc: the character wants something, goes on an internal or external exploration, encounters obstacles that push him or her to change in some way. Remember—all rules can be broken if it is in the best interest of the story. Characters may change as a result of the story you’ve created. If they do not change, perhaps they gain an awareness of why they are stuck.

Characters can emerge organically as a fragment of your personality, observed bits and pieces of people around you, or they may arrive fully formed in your imagination, as if in a dream. Everyone’s process is different and it may change for different stories. In my process, characters come to me. They are varied in age and demographics, but all have some sort of problem that my story or novel will reveal. I do not know ahead of time how my story will play out though many writers plot and outline every step of their stories. There is no one way or right way to create a story. If outlining works for you, that’s fine.

Fiction can include thrillers, mysteries, romances, literary and historical stories, horror, speculative fiction, sci-fi, and its related genre, cli-fi. Only you can decide what kind of story you want to write. It helps if you read widely. What do you most enjoy reading? I most enjoy character-driven fiction, but I also read widely from most every other type of fiction and nonfiction.

You need not like your protagonist or main character. I dislike some of mine. Even if you’re lucky enough to have characters arrive fully formed in your imagination, your observational skills will take that character to the next level. Steal a description of the woman standing at a bus stop or the man bending down to put a hat on his toddler in a stroller. Airports, bus stations, restaurants, the Department of Motor Vehicles are good places to get ideas for character descriptions. Eavesdrop in diners or on a train or plane. I make a concentrated effort not to create characters like any I’ve seen on television or in movies. Stereotypic characters make for boring fiction.

One of the exciting parts of character creation for me is animating a character. Once I’ve created him or her, I add in gestures and habits. One of my characters wakes up with a random song each day. Another character whips up exotic dishes. Gestures or habits make your character feel real to a reader. Think of Hannibal Lector in Silence of the Lambs or Forrest Gump. Both of those movies were based on books (Thomas Harris wrote Silence of the Lambs and Winston Groom wrote a book about a savant that became the movie, Forrest Gump). Both of these stories featured characters whose quirks reached cult status. The stranger the behavior, the more interesting a character may become. Experiment, observe, take notes. Your story is waiting to be written!