How to Create Fictional Characters that Come to Life in Your Romance Novels

Creating fictional characters for a romance novel is harder than many people may think. Anytime you are dealing with two human beings in love or even just deeply attracted to each other, you need to take into account any all possibilities for the relationship. If an author writes anything in regards to their hero and heroine in a romance novel that does not ring true or feels off to the reader, this can seriously put a crunch on an author’s revenue. Make your readers fall in love with all the main characters and truly care about what happens to them during the course of the story.

Difficulty: Moderately Challenging

Instructions

1. Sit down and write what details you know about your characters. If you already know what your characters look like, then write that down. Do you know what some of their personality traits are? Write those down too. Who are their best friends? Where do they work? Get it all on paper before going to the next step.

2. One exercise you can do when creating a fictional character is to interview that character. Either you or someone else should come up with a list of questions to ask the character about themselves. You as the writer will be answering these questions as the character, and this is one way you can flesh out their personality.

3. Repeat Step 2 with at least two other people. Different people will come up with different things they want to know about your characters. Sometimes questions will be asked that you haven't even thought of. This exercise lets you be proactive and cover all the bases as you are making these characters as realistic as possible and thus bringing them to life.

4. Make sure you know exactly how the characters look, dress, think, behave and feel. Then describe those things in detail throughout your book. There is nothing worse for a reader than having characters that comes off as flat or uninteresting because the author didn’t take the time to understand the details about the characters.

5. Show, don’t tell. Make it a point to show what is happening to the character rather than telling. Readers can always tell when a writer is a beginner because typically beginning writers start out “telling” the story. If the writer wants to get good at writing, they must develop a writing style that shows rather than tells. This goes a long way toward making your characters come to life for your readers.

Tips & Warnings

• Before asking people to come up with a list of questions for your character, give them some traits and background so they can come up with more concrete questions.
• In order for characters to be believable, make certain they don’t do or say anything contrary to the personality you have given them. For example, it wouldn't ring true if a character, who is clearly against wearing real fur, receives a mink coat by her lover and she wears it because it is from him instead of refusing it.