So, if you’ve read my previous posts, you already know my bias towards strong characterisation. I personally believe that stories are all about us. Well, not us specifically. Probably not a lot of people that care about you or me. But we’re innately interested in the lives, trials and tribulations of others. And the more fleshed out we can make those others, the more realised and believable, the more our readership will care about our fictitious others. 

But I get it, it’s hard. No one is born with the ability to make interesting characters. And there’s a lot of one-dimensional, stock characters floating around in the fiction which we may consume, enjoy or wish to emulate.

So today, we’re going to do something different and discuss a few techniques for taking our character creation to the next level. 

Let’s discuss homework.

These are not, by any means, tried and tested techniques. These are just things that I did on my own. Honestly, this first technique was my personal trick for developing my characters and it served two functions. One, it helped me to create a “mind space” for me to understand that individual’s perspective (who should have a different outlook than my own otherwise we’re just making Mary Sues). Two, it helped me procrastinate. No wait, it helped me to cure writer’s block. 

That’s the one. 

What I did was I created “character sketches.” No, these weren’t actual drawings – my art ability is dreadful. These were simple little scenes that highlighted the soul of my fictitious individual. It was a moment to really capture who that character was. So, for the Red Sabre series, I knew I wanted a right hand man to my protagonist. Since this was set in a wild west setting, I was intrigued by the gambler archetype. Thus, I wrote a little scene of him “stealing” on a casino paddle boat. These aren’t particularly long – just a few pages – but they’re meant to make the character the highlight and to play to their unique strengths. These little sketches were not meant to be part of the story I was writing, so there wasn’t any concern for quality. My only goal was to get their personality down. 

The sketches helped keep ideas fresh too. I could take moments to explore my world and characters that wouldn’t ever be seen. And in a few cases, something from a sketch would end up being referenced in the main story as the person spoke of their background – providing a sense of history that can often be missing in writing. 

Another trick I used was I would base characters on people in my life. It’s easy to get a sense for how a fictitious person will react in strange and novel circumstances by imagining how your friends or family would behave in those circumstances. Obviously, we don’t know for certain how, say, our aunt might react to a bloody necromancer ritual but I think this taps into the inherent imaginative play that it’s a pretty intuitive method for creating early characterisation. Make a character based on your best friend and then walk them through some of the challenges and trials of your story and you’ll start seeing your character behave in ways that you wouldn’t. 

A short exercise you can do is write a brief description of a character’s room. Our bedrooms can reveal a lot about our personality. Our choice of wall decorations (or lack there of), how we keep our dirty and clean clothes or what items are prioritised and put on display? What’s sitting in the waste basket? You can do a sort of cinematic panning of the space from the doorway. This also helps to develop some descriptive skills and give a simple perspective as we follow. Try to go into as much detail as possible. Don’t just describe the bed as either messy or made. What’s on it? How many pillows? What’s the colour of the bedsheets or blanket? Is there anything peculiar? Crumbs? An open book? An interdimensional imp? The benefit of this exercise is you may even come up with some descriptive prose that will be beneficial to your story as well. Protagonists going to their private quarters is a pretty common scene, after all.

The last exercise is one I did way back in high school when I took a creative writing course. This one was similar to the room description but it was focused on the character themself. For this technique, you write a description of the character out on the street during a “normal” day. What a normal day, or even what street they’re on, will naturally change based on the character you’re focusing on. However, most of the prose should be directed to how the character looks. What are they wearing? How’s their hair? Are they holding anything? This specific high school exercise also required us to include three personal items in the character’s pockets with one being “unusual.” How you defined unusual will naturally help differentiate the character from yourself. Since that character probably thinks it’s entirely normal to have a little mummified maggot on a chain in their pocket. But how did they come to have this unusual item and why are they carrying it around?

Those answers are fun little prompts to start get the creative juices flowing and help to crystalise a picture of your people as entities separate from your thoughts, beliefs and biases. I recommend every starting writer to try these techniques with their protagonist. And, anytime you start writing a character you just aren’t fully getting, it’s perfect to fall back on these techniques to help you out. I still do it from time to time if there’s a character in my story that’s giving me trouble letting me into their “head space.”

And you never feel guilty for not hitting your normal word count goals if you’re spending them on homework, right?