How to Develop Your Novel Characters

For a fiction book to be great, it must be believable and draw readers in. One of the most important ways for a book to accomplish this is for the characters to be real and believable. You must develop your characters in order to make them believable enough for readers to be drawn into the story. With a few tips and tricks, you can make your novel characters multifaceted, interesting and believable.

Difficulty: Moderately Challenging

Instructions

Instructions

1. Make a list of your characters and write down the core traits you wish them to have. For instance, you may want your hero to be brave and loyal. You may want your romantic interest to be charming and funny.

2. Create flawed characters. If you create perfect characters, or characters with absolutely no flaws, they will not be believable to readers. Readers relate to characters through themselves, and since no one is perfect or views themselves as perfect, characters with no flaws are not relatable.

3. Look through celebrity pictures on the Internet and determine which ones your characters look most like. List your characters' physical appearances, including height, weight, build, eye color, hair color and any special attributes that stand out.

4. Ask your character questions and then answer them. This will allow you to get into the mindset of each character and fully explore it.

5. Create a two- to three-page summary of each character, explaining who he is and what sort of personality he has. This should be fairly easy after the work you've done developing your characters and their personality, likes, dislikes and so on.

References

• Helpful Links from Charlotte Dillon

Resources

• Developing Realistic Characters by Tina Morgan