By: Serena Freeman
If you’ve ever tried to write a fiction story and felt like your characters were missing something, you’re not alone. Building a complex personality for your not only your protagonist, but also you antagonist and party of supporting characters, can be tricky. But investing the time to add in those details will help you bring your characters to life and make tough decisions with confidence. Here are some tips that can help you develop greater depth in your characters.
This may seem cliché, but it can help you develop nuances in your character and make sense of their choices and actions. You shouldn’t even necessarily include this backstory in your text; if you fully understand where your character came from and embrace their past, it’ll come through to your readers. Try to answer simple and more complicated questions as you write their history. Where do your characters come from? What kind of family and culture did they grow up in? How did these elements shape the people they are now? Having a backstory for your characters can really help with knowing what your character would do in any given situation. And once you come to care about your characters, your writing will become much stronger.
Developing a character beyond what the reader sees can help the character take on a life that extends beyond the pages. It makes them more real. Think about your characters’ motivators, their hidden feelings, and all the little things they might be thinking that are not revealed through the text. Imagine them as a real person you’re friends with. The aspects that you see when you hang out with them are only a part of their personality, but the way they act are driven by things beyond what they express to you.
You can do this in list form, web form, or pretty much any format that suits you. The important thing is that you have a reference tool to help you develop your characters’ relationships, both with other characters and with various aspects of their environment. Write down the obvious relationship elements – “aunt,” “friend,” “coworker,” “school,” etc. as well as the less obvious elements – “met through an ex-boyfriend, which sometimes triggers unpleasant memories,” or “this is a place where they go to spend time alone because they prefer the way the wind rustles through the leaves and the songs of birds who live there.” Include whatever details you feel are important to understanding the relationship between the characters and/or place(s) involved.
Do your characters like to play the guitar? Are they afraid of change? Do they have some special talent? Writing down what you do know about your characters can help you figure out the bits you don’t, especially when you are feeling stuck. Remember – it’s not just what’s spectacular or unique about your characters that’s important. The mundane qualities give them relatable and realistic elements that help them fit into the world of your story.
Good writing takes time and effort to cultivate. These steps may seem like a lot of work, but they can help you get past obstacles and serve as a valuable reference tool whenever you need to make important decisions regarding your charactesr. They can help you to remember and develop the aspects of your characters that make them interesting.
Creativity
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A good guidance , it helps a starter very much.
I too had similar situation when I took an excercise for myself to write a fiction book “Front runners of Hunsehalli” At present its still in draft stage. Its about a village which had rich culture and social fabric. Vagaries of depleting rain fall and arid atmosphere forces the peasants to migrate to cities with lots of job and business opportunity. In this background I took myself to write a fiction around four families of the village. In this excercise I in my own way as a learner of fiction writing made a tabular work sheet to serve as ready reckoner depicting details like who are the members of each one, their age and job/prfession, their interrelation,their likes and dislikkes and similar relavent details.This worksheet is used as a ready reckoner to develop the social interactions among them, affairs,conflicts, and the like. As the above post has given the same line of thinking in a concise form giving more clear format. Hats off to you and thank you….kranand