Building a Character

 

Here are a few things I've learned about building a character.

One of the first things, you should ask yourself is Why should my audience care about my character? The answers will be limitless so only you can answer it. But you should be able to answer it. If you don't care about them, you can't expect your readers to.

You don't have to use an information-dump to tell the readers about the character. Their personality and what-nots can be revealed through action, dialogue, and other characters. How they react to a situation can say a lot about a person. You can actually create a form or download one through a website to help you fine tune your character. The questionnaire will help you get inside their head and learn more about them, why they do the things they do. Even if you don't use this information in the story, knowing about their childhood can offer you the explanation of why he's scared of the dark, or why he doesn't have friends. The more you know about him, the better you can tell his story.

Events in the story must have some kind of impact on the character. Reactions make a difference. If it doesn't push the plot forward, it's probably not needed. The readers won't care about it if the character doesn't care about it, one way or the other.

Keep names for the time period of the story. So if your story is in the middle ages, don't use a name that's modern. Research does go a long way in these cases. Unless, you name someone intentionally. There's a reason for everything lol. Don't eliminate nicknames. A woman's name is Susan, a friend could call her Sue, another friend calls her Suzie. That helps with the other characters, giving them individuality which makes a difference. You can actually make up names too, especially the last names. Giving them a name that shows who they are can be a fun way to reveal that part of the character to the reader too. That's something new I learned lol. In the book Creating Characters from Writer's Digest actually goes into this. On page 25, it shares an example using the name Winton Fayhler.......

Winning, Winton, Win, Lose, Fail, Failer.

Winton Fayhler (win failer)

I thought that was clever, using this method. It made me think about names differently which is totally awesome. I may not have to use baby name lists ever again lol.

Point of Views. There are a lot of different POVs you can use and you can mix them up if you want. But there can only be one POV in a paragraph. If you are switching, change paragraphs. This helps the confusion to stay low lol. Makes sense to me. When deciding on the POV for your story, you should ask yourself if the main character and the POV character are the same people. Doesn't have to be, by the way. But if they are not the same person, you may not know what's going on inside the MC's head. Have a good reason if they are not the same. Also, ask yourself if you have more to gain by having two different characters (MC and POV character) or more to lose. Then you can decide which person you will be telling the story in. First, second, or third, and so on.

If you change POV, something to remember....you don't really want to have more than 3 or 4 different POVs in one scene. Jumping from one to the other too many times will cause confusion. If the reader is too confused, they may put the story down and never pick it back up so you want to keep that to a minimum if you can help it. Whoever you choose for the POV character, that person (or thing, depending on the story) needs to be involved with the plot. They need to be present for the action, unless you are telling the story through another person--he's being told after the fact as in a story within a story type of thing. In that case, the act was already done and now someone is sharing it with someone else.

Give each character his/her own unique voice. That way, when he/she speaks or acts, the reader will know who it is. In those cases, you don't have to say he said, she said all the time. The way Alice speaks will be different from the way Mary speaks--the choices of words. Alice uses Mom and Mary uses Mother. So when Alice is speaking and she says "Mom, I'd like your help please." You know it's Alice and not Mary speaking. That was just an example. You can use slang and other methods too. There are quite a few different things in the book if you happen to have a copy.

You can have your character actually say the story's theme to move the plot forward. I found that interesting when I read it in the book, something I didn't know before lol. The book used the movie Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl as an example. It furthers the tension in the story.

I've read books with profanity and I have used some in my own writing. It's not intentional but it is how my characters speak. It's real. That is something that should be considered and should only be used if you're comfortable with it. I like to listen to how people talk. Being a writer, I have the excuse to eavesdrop on conversations. It is a way to learn how people talk to one another in real-time. And it's fun lol. But for me, it's only research and I'm not doing it to be mean or anything. One person will say sh#t every other word while the other person doesn't say it at all. I don't think you want to do that in dialogue so instead of saying it every other word, you can tell the reader that's how they talk and then just have the clean version in the dialogue. You'd have to remind the reader every now and then though lol. You don't want to annoy the reader with sh#t every other word. The same goes for stuttering, one line to show it and then just let the reader know. 

You can invent words to use instead of using profanity too. That could be fun. Just so you know.

That's about all I'm going to share in this post today. There are so many things about building a character and this is pretty short from everything I've learned and still learning. Some of these things I already knew from reading about writing when I was a kid but it's been a long time since I read those books so I'm reading them again, even picking up new books on the subject because no one knows everything lol. I'm going to keep learning and I hope you do too. It's how we grow as writers. So until next time, you have a great day! Have fun creating that perfect character!!!