Hey up all!

Here’s to another writing advice session. Today, because I’ve decided to talk about something I’m personally very invested in. Perhaps unnecessarily more actually writing the novel itself: character design.

I’ve been obsessed with making characters since I was a little brat, because I’ve got an eye for certain tics and traits. It’s great fun to step into another mind detached from your own and figure out what diesel they run on – some might be more renewable, of course! Aside from my shoddy aliens in my mine Novel project, I do design a lot of human characters for my short stories, especially prompts; they too are usually pretty eccentric in design. I’ve had a three metre tall daemonologist lady, a thoroughly pretentious serial killer who gets just deserts for his last meal, a pair of wily twins who’ve tried to exploit egg prices in a bird flue epidemic and even a flock of rebellious, storm worshipping sheep; all created for my last online course!

It comes easy to me, but I’m aware that some people really struggle with coming up with the right sort of clots to populate their stories. I’ve witnessed a lot of fellow writer’s worries – “Is the shopkeeper relevant to my story theme?”,”Is my sidekick not too annoying?”, “Have I made this petty villain likeable enough?”, “Could my demon lord beat Sans Undertale?” and so on. Well, I’m not an expert for all my confidence, but I’ll try and see what I can bring to the table…

Characters!

Your story will have characters, no matter what. Once you’ve got your protagonist and motivation (heck, even before then oftentimes), you’ll slip into creating life around them to support or oppose them. You might think about family first or think about friends – it’s worth noting now that a protagonist probably should have at least a few of either, especially friends. Nobody, not even the most anti-social, most unpopular mortal on earth, is completely friendless. Well, at least don’t lack the potential to make friends across their arc. It’s hard to give a character thrilling stakes if they’re a complete egotist with noone else to depend on and, frankly, it’s not very enjoyable to read/write a story where everyone beats up your protagonist.

Character friends is a good point to begin with before I go into the uber-technical side of character development, as such figures tend to play the most active roles in stories. Who a character chooses to socialise and surround themselves with reflects their own personality/motives quite substantially; seemingly weird pairings especially speak highly about a character’s obscure side. Why a vulgar, hard drinking Rockstar with a reluctance to read regularly visits her meek local librarian is one such question. It might be that the Librarian is a big fan of her music and they’re in a romantic relationship – a basic motive to start with. It might be that the librarian is an old music teacher who Rockie has to thank for inspiring her to produce songs and they bond over analysing shoddy film scores? Perhaps the rockstar accidentally ran over the librarian’s daughter, which the latter didn’t know, so Rockie is trying to atone for her tragic accident by looking after their sole remaining parent? Hell, it could even be that the Librarian is dealing ectasy below public suspicion and Rockie happens to be a customer! Edgy, yes, but striking and unexpected.

Of course, not every protagonist is going to associate with other characters in such complex and bizarre ways. In fact, not all your characters are going to require a lot of in-depth thinking. Most of your characters are just there to populate your world and make it feel realistic; they probably won’t contribute too much to the story. A great deal of these minor characters can be excused as flat – you don’t need to clutter your narrative with extensive backstories and relationships, so you can write in a few characters who merely appear to do something small and relevant. Like take too long to cross the road, loudly promote their oranges or simply act as one union hive mind – a crowd of onlookers can very much be treated as one relatively simple character. Even then, you ought to give them some details otherwise they won’t even be a character at all – you can afford to describe a singular defining characteristic or give them some simple dialogue. Save all your precious energy for writing more relevant characters to the plot.

With your major characters, you might need to bring about certain narrative techniques and observations. For example, some characters might be Foils to one another. This basically means that they are deliberate contrasts in terms of a certain quality/ies, if not completely mutually exclusive. The protagonist tends to be a foil of the antagonist – they wreck eachother’s gardens simply because their differing midsets happen to directly oppose one another. In this case, their foil contrasts usually lie on important virtues/flaws to make one seem more “righteous” than the other, therefore positioning the reader to sympathise more with the usually kinder protagonist. Of course, some foil characters can even be best friends because of their differences – a coward might appreciate the protection of a brazen fool and in turn be respected for their intelligent contributions to personal matters. As a character must develop, they may actually start out very similar to their eventual foil or vice versa before a certain revelation – a development like this is always neat.

If you have an understanding of narrative convention, you can use it to catalyse your creation of characters. It’ll make the work much easier to start!There’s also composite characters – characters who have a combination of traits and similarities to other characters and may fulfill a similar role because of it. There are confidants, usually best friends who contributes to their actions and is the listening subject of their monologues. Confidants may often be detached narrators themselves, monitoring the actions of the real protagonist through a distanced point of view, and/or act as a sort of fill in for the audience by working their anticipated reactions and questions into the story. There’s also straight men in comic novels (who don’t necessarily have to be heterosexual) who remains aloof from the silliness and keeps a straight face, often making their partner’s shenanigans even funnier by their indifference, as well as stopping the narrative from being full of exaggerated hysterics. These are a few stock conventions you might find handy – there is always more you can find on other blogs about character basis. Remember – you don’t always have to to write a character to meet an archetype, especially if you want to avoid certain cliches.

If you want to write effective characters, you ought to consider a few things about their execution. Firstly, you need to make your characters stand out. Even if they have very similar roles and motives to another character, if they speak and act exactly the same without any narrative impact they might feel redundant. You might then need to consider either spicing up one of them or possibly removing them altogether – if a supposedly important character doesn’t really contribute anything interesting or unique, they can be fused with another character or chucked altogether. I’ve said it before, and it’s highly unoriginal advice, but be prepared kill your darlings if they’re a nuisance. They’re not real people, so it’s not like it’s murder. To spice up a character, you might need to think about giving them unique elements. Alter the language they use, add a few tics like avoiding eye contact or laughing at their own jokes, make them approach their motivation differently. Certainly don’t make every character a voice piece for you and avoid straw characters; just because they represent an ideology you adhere to or reject, doesn’t mean they should be absolutely (un)likeable and stereotypical.

Secondly, make sure your characters surprise the reader (and you) sometimes. Not all people act rigidly according to a set of personality traits; sometimes we subvert ourselves, especially as we develop and change our outlooks. An otherwise stoical, polite character might lose their rag over something petty – that will speak measures about some previously unclear aspects of their personality and possibly accentuate the severity of the stimulus. People change – if you’re going to focus on a set of characters, we need to reflect on the lasting impact of the story’s events on their way of life; even the indirect and minute things have cause and effect.

Thirdly, to keep track of all this stuff, it’s recommended that you keep notes on your characters so that you don’t forget defining traits or new developments. Character profiles are also a good way to prep yourself for putting your characters into new situations if you’ve got some preliminary work on their personality in place. You can go about this any way you like, digital or hand, regimentally organised or impromptu. Just keep some notes available, yeah?

Right-oh. That should be enough for today. It’s worth mentioning on the note of character design that I do have a resource you can use – a character questionnaire to help you understand their motives. I’m not sure if people are using/want that, since I don’t get much comments from you, but it’s fair enough if you’re too busy to say anything. Let me know if you’d like me to repost that, please! I hope this advice and all the other ramblings I’ve provided so far helps stimulate some good character designs. I can always go into more detail about it in future, if you’d like.

Apologies also for the lateness of this advice piece! Hope the ides of september bring you kinder weather – I’m waiting out the last heatwave of the year with some frustration. Cya!