I noticed something in my recent creative writing classes: we writers love the idea of telling a bigger story. We all want to have a profound message behind our tale, something the audience will take away from it and ponder. But all that moral goodness is for naught if your audience isn’t satisfied with your story’s characters—if your readers don’t care about your characters, they likely won’t care for your story either. I’ve watched a writing professor deconstruct what seemed like an interesting story until it was apparent that without character development, the story lacked substance.
Here are some things to consider when thinking about your story’s characters:
What do your characters want, and why do they want it? Your characters’ motivations explain to the reader why they bother getting out of bed in the morning. Even if they are just reacting, no one takes a course of action without reason. Characters are believable when there’s a reason for what they’re doing. Dynamic characters may even have more than one motivation, displaying a surface desire while seeking an underlying need. Does Prince Charming actually want to rescue the princess to fulfill his destiny, or does he have a deep personal need to feel desired by someone?
How does your character change? Unless you are a bag of rocks (and in many cases, not even then), you cannot go through an ordeal without having changed somehow. During a story’s climax, something happens. How the characters either rise to the challenge or fall apart in the face of adversity determines the difference between a Pixar ending and a Shakespearian tragedy, but both have dynamic characters that changed during their journeys.
Is this character relatable? Or more importantly, how relatable does this character need to be? This one’s a bit of a head scratcher. We all want to create unique, interesting characters, but want the audience to connect with them just the same. I bow to the wisdom of Janet Burroway’s Writing Fiction for this one: a relatable character is a “universal paradox” where they are unique enough to characterize a type of person, but relatable enough that a larger audience can find some of themselves in that character. Her advice? Aim for making that character an individual, but keep them in range of the familiar. If you try to make a character that embodies the universal spectrum of character traits, they will be relatable to nobody. Make the character a person with believable motivations, wants, and needs, and the audience will connect to that.
Why is your character like this? Also add “what purpose does this serve?” to your list of important self-aware questions. Why did you design a character that way? Having personality traits is important, but having meaningful ones is more so. Like imagery and world building details, your audience does not want to sift through meaningless information to find the important stuff. If a character likes trains or peanut butter and chocolate swirl ice cream, there better be a good reason for it. To take this a step further, the same goes for gender, race, nationality, etc. Diversity in a character roster can be great for a story. But without building that character’s race, gender, etc. into the characters themselves, you risk creating a token character that parodies or stereotypes the diversity you originally intended.
—Jesse Dodson
Photo c/o Bert Aguirre, via Flickr Creative Commons