Creating believable characters

If you are writing fiction you will be creating characters. These characters may be human, animal, vegetable or anything else that has an impact on your story. To ensure your readers engage with your story your characters need to come to life and behave in a way that your readers can relate to or accept even if this behaviour is immoral or illegal; remember your readers do not have to like the character or behaviour.

Start by writing everything you can about each of your main characters and, most importantly, identify want they want and their motivations for wanting it. You can use a character profile template for each character if this helps or you can free write everything that comes to mind. Give each character some memorable traits that will have an impact on them during your story e.g. a fear of flying, always having toast for breakfast, a scar or a limp. Name your characters when you are ready – this might be after you have completed all of your character profiles.

Once you know as much as you can about your characters you will know how they will behave in any given situation, you will also understand when and why then might act out of character – and so will your readers. You do not need to include all of the information about your characters in your story however you will know what you need to show the reader, such as a character limping, before it becomes an important part of the story.

Here are some headings that you might like to use when creating your own characters, feel free to add other headings, combine them or duplicate information:

Character: main character

Gender: male

General background: write as much or as little as you need to ensure you understand how your character reached this point in time. Man is 36 years old, when he was 25 his parents emigrated to Australia, two years later his only sister (no brothers) was killed in a car accident. Since then he has spent all his time working and has slowly worked his way up. His promotions have been slower than other people and he believes this was because he was receiving help for depression.

What they want: a family

Barriers: you can add anything relevant at this stage if it happened prior to the start of your story however the barriers may be part of your plot and therefore not part of this profile. He pushes people away when they get too close emotionally, this prevents him developing long term relationships.

Traits: these can be character or physical traits or anything that is particular to your character. He is always friendly when he meets new people but will often alienate them if they get too close (afraid of losing people close to him).

Strengths: genuinely cares about other people and will go out of his way to help others.

Weaknesses: he has high expectations in the workplace and can get angry when he believes someone is not performing at their best.

Age: 36

Physical features: hair colour: tall, brown hair, physically fit.

Job: area manager for a chain of health centres.

Hobbies: no hobbies outside of his job

Name: add a name when you are ready

Create profiles for your characters, do this even if you have started writing your novel or short story. If you fully understand your characters and their motivations then it is likely your readers will too.

Happy writing.