How To Build Your Perfect Character

Character building is important for every style of writing, not just fiction writing. If you are writing historical nonfiction, you must portray the characters well enough so that your reader doesn’t put your work down and even if you’re writing your own memoir, you have to make those you write about be relatable, interesting and often much more. Here are some helpful hints to help you as you move forward in your writing process.

Hints & Tricks:

1. Giving your villain better lines.
   1. A drama writing instructor once told me this, “You should always give your villains better lines.” And this is why: whether your protagonist is a good person or not matters less than how interesting their battles (verbal or physical or mental) are with their antagonist. A good hero is great but what readers love to see is a villain that makes sense, at least a little; a villain that is relatable; a villain who promises to make the plot of the story interesting.
2. Coming up with a backstory that doesn’t fall through.
   1. What is backstory? It is your character’s history or background. You should try to have an idea of who all your major characters are, what motivates them, what they like and dislike. For example, why did your character decide to go on this journey? What made your villain so evil? Writing backstory is creating your character’s identity. Most backstory never reaches the published page but you should know it. Once you have a history in place, it will be much easier to decide how that character will act going forward. Characters that seem to only exist for the furtherance of the plot tend to be flat, archetypal and rather boring.
3. Characters should be consistent, even archetypes. No one changes who they are on a whim?
   1. What do I mean by this? If character A likes dancing, you can’t just make them hate it without giving a proper explanation. Or, more likely, a writer should never change a personality or physical defining trait of a character on a whim in a way that makes it deviate from how you originally presented them! Trust me, readers notice is and they don’t like it. I have personally given books 2-star reviews for changing a character willy-nilly, even if the rest was pretty good.
4. Character Mapping!
   1. This is the fun part! (There is an example of a sci-fi map below)
   2. It’s basically like a personality test for your character combined with a list of their main characteristics so that you can keep it straight in your head.
      1. How do you do it? For each character you write out their personality traits, their name, their circle and how they relate to other characters. You can include where they are from and anything else that is important to the story you are trying to tell.
   3. This is especially useful for “minor” characters, characters with similar names, etc. Why? Because it makes them harder to mix up! Once I tried writing characters whose names all began with the letter “A” and it was a mess. I should’ve mapped it out!
   1. A character map can be as detailed as you need it to be, so don’t worry about it being perfect or anything like that.
5. Interviewing your characters.
   1. Sit down and act like your character is right there in front of you. What would you talk about? What would they be eating? Drinking? Or would they even want to sit down with you? Are they playing with their hair or sitting a certain way?
   2. What do they have in their homes? Why?
   3. Are they looking at you or something else?
   4. Interviewing your characters lets you see them from an outsider’s perspective, the same view your readers will have. So if you can make them feel real to you, they will feel real to your readers and therefore, they will be more interested in how that character’s story turns out.
   5. What would make your character get into an argument? A fight?
6. Coming up with names for your characters
   1. I know that for many authors, coming up with names can be difficult. Here are a few ideas:
      1. Use names with meaning. (You can look up names and meanings all across the internet.)
      2. Make sure your names fit your character’s background. (Don’t give an Asian character who has always lived in Asia a westernized name.)
      3. They should fit the genre of the story you are writing.
      4. If you are using someone’s real name, make sure you have permission if it is someone you know. If you are writing fiction, make sure to include a disclaimer acknowledging that your work is purely fiction.

How do you build your characters? Have you made use of any of the tricks and hints we have listed here?

Other helpful sources:

• Creating Characters by Writer’s Digest
• The Emotion Thesaurus by Angela Ackerman and Becca Puglisi
• Reedsy’s Character Building Template

Do you have any helpful character creating hints? Let us know down below! Are you working on a character that seems to have a mind of their own?

Written by Chyina Powell

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