Every time I read a story or novel with great characters, I wish that I could create such dynamic, colorful characters. My goal with the last story I wrote, “Outlaw Love Story,” was to create characters that stood out to me and my readers, and to create a strong narration voice that I and my readers would sympathize with.
I thought about what I’d most recently read, and specific stories with great characters, and looked at what made them great. They had fears, goals, and quirks. Even eleven-year-old Greg (Diary of a Wimpy Kid) has a goal: Survive middle school. Seventeen-year-old Scarlett has several goals in Suite Scarlett: Help her brother get his play off without a hitch, keep up with the demands of Mrs. Amberson without going crazy, and get the guy. Annie’s goal in A Kind of Intimacy is to get Lucy out of the way so that she can be with Neil.
Once I recognized this pattern, I put it into play for my own characters.
You could easily use your own goals, fears, and quirks, but what fun would that be? You already know them inside out, so it would be a lot more interesting to explore other people’s goals, fears, and quirks. For example, my character Sade in Sade On the Wall is afraid of worms because my friend Sandy is afraid of worms. It’s going to be really fun to get inside of Sade’s head and explore that fear, just like it was fun getting into my character Yolanda’s (“Outlaw Love Story”) head and exploring being a controlling bitch. It was also a lot of fun getting into my character Eugene’s (“Eugene Bean Takes the Subway“*) head and exploring being a Trekkie who carries around a briefcase and aspires being a porn star.
Of course, you can’t just create fears and goals and quirks without knowing your character at least a little, right? Here’s how I usually** build my characters:
- Write a physical description of the character. Do they have green eyes? Brown hair? Are they tall or short? Do they have acne or tattoos? Their physical description should say a lot about their personality; my nerdy little Eugene has acne and is kind of a runt.
- List their likes and dislikes. For Sade, I made a list of all of the music I listened to as a teenager, and then made a list of music that she, being sixteen, would listen to. This told me a lot about how she was raised, considering she loves Queen and David Bowie.
- Decide what their fears, goals, and quirks are. They should have at least three of each.
Once you have these down, you can elaborate more on each of them, or you can wait until you’re writing to explore why Sade is afraid of worms.
How do you build your characters?
*This story was previously password-protected, but I’ve changed it to public so you can see what I mean. I still really need to rewrite this; I love my nerdy little Eugene!
**Quite often, though, random quirks will come to me and I’ll build them off of those quirks. Take Corey, for example. I knew Sade was going to have a little brother, but didn’t know anything about him until it suddenly hit me that he’s a high school freshman who is exploring converting to Islam.
