You have worked out your story’s plot. You know the direction your story will go, you know the problems your characters will face, and how your story will resolve. Good for you. You’ve put in the time and thought to make the story plausible. But who is your protagonist? Sure, you have the general idea of who you think they are, or who you think they should be, but do you know them well enough to write them?
It’s time to work on character development.
Character development is the creation process of building the people in your story world. They should feel three-dimensional. They should have depth, and personality, and each should have their own motivations and goals. They should also change or grow as people over the course of the novel.
If you don’t do the work to figure out your characters before you write them, you risk creating flat, uninteresting, and/or unrealistic characters that won’t intrigue your readers.
Boring.
Fictional characters should have pasts, and failures, and flaws, and hobbies, and things that will affect how they react under pressure when dealing with all the problems you have set up for them in your plot.
Each character should also be unique. If you people your story with different flavors of the same character they will feel flat to your readers, they will be uninteresting, they will be boring.
Fictional characters should also serve a purpose in your story. If you just people your story with story people who don’t have a particular purpose, then you are just writing filler. These purposeless, flat characters may be interesting to you, but they won’t move the story forward. They won’t help your main character grow, and change, and overcome.
Each of your characters should want something different, or at least they want the same something for different reasons. All of these goals and motivations have to be clear to the reader, which you express through your characters’ actions. And if you know the role that your characters serve, that will help you figure out other aspects of their personalities, motivations, conflicts, and core reactions to circumstances.
You (obviously) need a main character whom the story is about. You might need a villain. You might need secondary characters, and tertiary characters to tell the story. Maybe a mentor character. Maybe a trickster character.
I thought we could look at different kinds of characters, their roles, and why you might want them in your story. We will begin this next time.
Until then, stay healthy. Wash your hands. Love your people.