As humans, we are wired for empathy and vicarious living, so we easily put ourselves into stories if we can identify with what the characters are going through in the emotional and physical situations they encounter. Whether we are reading about war heroes who perform godlike acts and save hundreds of people or the girl next door whose life-changing event is having to move from her hometown to the big city, we want to consider how humans handle life. To keep us interested in reading, authors must invent characters that have complexity and inconsistencies like we do, characters that are believable and uniquely individual.

In her book Creating Unforgettable Characters, Linda Seger lists six action items for writers to employ in developing characters. I’ve paraphrased her list and provided ideas on how to approach accomplishing each item. It is a good idea to use the exercises at the start of your story development, but of course whenever you feel you have not drawn a character well enough, you can stop writing and go back to these questions:

Base your character on a person you observe or relate to:
Who interests you in the world? A neighbor? A teacher? A boss? A friend? Why do they interest you? Think about how being around them affects you. What in their manner, interests and topics of conversation resonate or irritate?

 Flesh out your character, drawing him or her in broad strokes:
What does this character look like? How does she or he dress? Where does she or he live? Who is in the family? How does she or he demonstrate a culture? How old is the character? What hobbies does the person have? What knee-jerk phrases does he or she use? What original phrases come to his or her lips?

Find the core values of your character so he or she will behave consistently:
What will she or he fight for? How did she or he learn that value? What makes it so important to have? What does she or he fear would happen if life didn’t contain the opportunity to hold and demonstrate this value? You might ask what this character most values about him or herself and what others most value about him or her.

Find the paradoxes within the character’s outlook to be sure he or she contains complexity:
People are self-contradictory and surprising. Linda Seger writes about a straight-laced religious professor who had been a cowboy and knew how to use a lasso. A female executive who has to be a boss all day, might cry regularly before leaving for work. So after you’ve figured out your character’s core values, give your character an inconsistency that will lead to a trait or relationship that conflicts with the character’s core values and makes the character interesting. One character might be a complete rationalist, skeptical of everything but addicted to buying lotto tickets.

Now add emotions and attitudes that will round out your character:
Give your character opinions, fears, things he or she avidly practices and believes in so you’ll know what makes your character sad, glad, mad, or scared. Is she afraid of spiders or speaking in public? Is he happy when he’s driving an expensive car down a lonely highway? Does she play mahjong in tournaments? Does he despise golf but enjoy bowling? Does she hate packaged food? Is his pet peeve people who move slowly?

When thinking about inconsistencies, attitudes and values consider also that characters can have unrealistic views of themselves. A character may think she is a perfect parent when in fact she is missing all the cues a good parent would see. A character may think he is the boss of the group when in fact no one listens to him. A young woman may think she is a glamour gal when actually how she dresses shows she has no idea about glamour as everyone else views it. A person may think she is humble and modest when in fact she is always striving to be the center of attention. A person might be compulsively neat in the office thinking he is perfect at his job, but very messy at home.

Make the character specific and unique through details:
The idiosyncratic way a character puts clothes together or sets food out for a pet or calls to her children or answers the phone is going to make that character memorable. Think about how your character answers the door or parks her car, how he avoids or moves toward people at a meeting. Visualize this person in the world. Note the idiosyncratic parts of their speech and gestures.

In addition to the protagonist, another important character is the antagonist, whose actions thwart the desires and needs of the main character. You also need to round out this person and make sure that his or her actions will be coming out of a life filled with goals, feelings, obsessions and desires. Black and white people are usually not very interesting. Create an antagonist who has surprisingly pleasing traits even though he or she is the reason the protagonist can’t get what he wants. People may do evil and people may be greedy and thoughtless and tiresome, but all people have something tender and vulnerable about them. I remember hearing a long time Alcatraz prisoner who had served a long sentence for murder talk about how he became motivated to turn his life around after he sat handcuffed on a train from one prison to another watching a two-year-old boy stare at him. He didn’t want to die without redeeming himself if he could. Certainly your antagonist, a mother with nothing good to say to her daughter about her the girl’s father, can have a moment of hoping that when they do see the father he will be interested in her.

In his book The Weekend Novelist, Robert J. Ray writes about detailing characters this way:

…you need to stay open…one way to stay open is to bring a character onto your novel’s stage and see what happens once she gets there. You sketch her first. You give her a past and some dreams and a place to live and a wardrobe that fits her life-style. As she comes on stage, you take notes. Let’s say she lights a cigarette. What brand is it? Light falls across the glass-topped table to illuminate a film of dust. What is the source of the light? When she leaves her chair, where is she going? Staying open means not knowing but paying attention to the moment.

Whatever way you look at it, details create the character. Without the details, the character is generic, interchangeable among stories.

Midge Raymond, author of the short story collection Forgetting English, says, “All good stories start with great characters — and while they don’t necessarily have to be loveable, they do have to be interesting.” Developing a new character:

is not unlike meeting a new friend: It’s a getting-to-know-you process, and it happens gradually. First, you’ll see what a person wants you to see (how he looks, what he says, what he does). Later, you learn more (what motivates her, what she fears, what she desires or avoids). Then you can take a good look into the character’s true nature (i.e., what he says and does versus how he feels — and whether these are in synch or in conflict). Once you get going, you’ll likely start thinking of your own questions, particularly those that are directly related to other characters and the plot of your story.

She advocates asking the following questions:

How does your character react to getting cut off in traffic? What sort of gifter is this person around the holidays — generous or stingy? a regifter? What’s in the glove compartment of his/her car, and what’s in the bedside drawer? Who cleans his/her house? Who is the closest person in the world to your character, and who does he/she battle with the most? (Note: this may be the same person.) What thoughts keep your character up at night? and how does he/she treat insomnia? From here, try creating some of your own questions; then answer them. Once you get going, think of more questions, particularly ones directly related to other characters and the plot of your story.

And one more exercise Midge Raymond suggests to help you see your character from different angle is to write a conversation between two people talking about your character behind his/her back. As a follow-up, write another scene in which your character overhears this conversation. How does he/she react?

Ron Carlson uses the word “inventory” in his book, Ron Carlson Writes a Story, when he speaks about fleshing out characters. Give them settings and props. “When in doubt include things.” He says:

We may have Doris over the sink trying to get the lid off the espresso maker while not getting water on the sleeves of her silk blouse, and we may not know her state of mind, but at least we have that small appliance, the running water, and her sleeves to help us into the next sentence.”

Beyond the Protagonist and Antagonist
Even secondary characters have to seem as if they’ve come from life, rather being hired from a central casting agency for a short generic performance. Think of some of the people in your main character’s life, people from that character’s work life, family, gym or favorite restaurant. Run some of these characters through the six steps Linda Seger suggests. You might not use all of that in the story, but all of it will inform the encounters the main character has with the secondary characters. At the start, you can’t know all of them or which you’ll use but the exercise will keep you focused on making characters stick in the minds of the readers. The characters will add to the fictional dream you are creating, not distract from it by appearing as if they are there only to create opportunities for the main character to have someone to talk with or react to.

When you are dealing with secondary characters, Adrianne Harun, author of The King of Limbo and Other Stories, takes a line from Carol Shields’ The Stone Diaries as her guiding light, “Life is an endless recruiting of witnesses.” Many beginning fiction writers, Harun offers:

find it difficult to move from a situation to a story. There are all sorts of reasons for that, of course, some having to do with understanding causality, others having to do with not fully comprehending what the situation means to the characters, what the greater subtext might be.

One route into uncovering a reason and dynamic for the story within a situation is to put the secondary or minor characters to work, and to do that, first you have to get to know everyone a bit better. To see how secondary characters and stories can illuminate a larger story take a secondary character from a chapter or story and have that character relate a memory tangential to the larger situation.

For example, say your story or chapter introduces two feuding sisters who speak to each other only through their housekeeper, whom they treat like a useful kitchen tool. You might have the housekeeper relate a memory about a sibling of her own, say a story about her deaf younger brother. Perhaps the housekeeper’s brother once got into trouble while she was supposed to be watching him, but instead was intent on listening to a new record through her headphones. Or the housekeeper might recall how that same brother saved a girl’s life because he was the only one to see a beam breaking in a crowded and extremely noisy nightclub. Or maybe the housekeeper’s brother wandered into a bank robbery and foiled it by his seemingly fearless appearance between the robbers and the frightened tellers. This secondary story must contain a dramatic element — that is, something must happen. The main characters — in this case, the sisters who employ the housekeeper — must not be mentioned in this anecdote/story.

More Important Advice for Making Engaging Characters
Josip Novakovich writes in his book Fiction Writer’s Workshop that in good stories, some characters change and some do not; the ones with constancy and unchangeability can make the story, too, Novakovich says. “The part of the character that does not conform builds a conflict and the conflict makes the story.” For instance, a father who belittles his son for not having the kind of profession the father enjoys learns the value of his son’s job when people like his son save the father’s life. The son hasn’t changed and his not changing allows the story to happen.

Whomever your character, though, never stereotype, Novakovich instructs. We may need gamblers and misers in our stories to tell them, but we must write them not as misers, but as people “who happen to be miserly.”

He uses questions like these to sketch out his characters:

Name? Age? Place of birth? Residence? Occuption? Appearance? Dress? Strengths? Weakness? Obsessions? Ambition? Hobbies? Illness? Family? Parents? Kids? Siblings? Pets? Politics? Tics? Diet? Drugs? Favorite kinds of coffee, cigarettes, alcohol? Erotic history? Favorite books, movies, music? Desires? Fears? Most traumatic event? Most wonderful experience? The major struggle, past and present?

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Your Turn
To work on developing your characters, pick and choose from among these writers’ exercises. If you become stuck in writing your story, you can stop and answer more of the questions or create your own: What holiday is my character’s favorite holiday? Why? Where does my character hope to go on vacation? Where does she shop for food? What does he post on his Facebook page?

You get the idea. The aim is to find out enough to have your characters act believably as well as surprisingly in your imagination so they can portray themselves in the story you are writing.

An idea for writing a story as you develop a character: Give your character an imaginary Facebook page: What conflict is brewing in his or her soul and what does he or she post because of it? What do others post back; what causes and groups is he or she asked to become a fan of, what Facebook games does the character play? I don’t know if this has been done yet in short story or novella form, but I think creating a story this way lends itself to practicing good character development.

If you don’t like Facebook, you can develop something similar by using the diary form–choose a character, choose a conflict facing the character, keep a log. For instance, maybe the character has just learned she is diabetic, has to cope with weight loss and has been told to keep a food journal. What does she write in it? How revealing can you make it about her life?

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Our series on writing fiction will continue with exercises on creating dialog, scenes, subplots and tweaking tone.