Readers demand living, breathing, suffering characters.
If you can't create characters that grab the reader by the scruff of the neck and make them sit up and take notice, you might as well not write the story.
That may seem like a harsh thing to say, but it's a sad fact that readers have too much choice in what they read to spend any time with characters they don't immediately care about.
Characters are the life-blood of a story. Without them the story doesn't exist. Readers don't care about what happens in a story, they care about what happens to the characters in a story.
So the people who make your story happen, have to be as real as you can possibly make them.
But how are such characters created? How can you make sure that your characters seem real, so that your reader completely identifies with them and can't put the story down until the fate of the character is known?
Here are 10 quick tips to breathe life into your characters:
1. Names are important. Don't call a thirteen year old hellion Agnes unless you have a good reason for doing so.
2. Don't make your characters perfect. Readers want the people in stories to have some flaws, just like they do.
3. Make sure your character's personality dictates the scrapes they get into.
4. Also make sure your character's personality dictates the way in which they solve the problem.
5. Make your character's speech pattern match their personality. Eg, don't have a young person or child use words that seem too grown up.
6. Your character must alter in some way by the end of the story. In other words, they must grow and learn by what happens to them.
7. Pay attention to what they wear. Clothes, and the colours they choose, speak volumes about what kind of people they are.
8. Let them solve their own problems. For instance, if they're stuck down a hole, don't have someone come by and rescue them. Instead make them find a way to climb out. They will be so much the stronger for finding their own solution.
9. Make their problems huge. The more there is at stake, the better in fiction.
10. Last but not least, is to keep your characters busy. Always have them doing something that directly relates to the story. For instance, if your character is having a cup of tea, then make sure your whole story will fall apart if they don't have that tea just then. If the tea is unnecessary, cut it out.
If you bear these ten pointers in mind when creating characters for your stories, you will find that not only are the characters themselves stronger, but you have a stronger story too.
