How To Make Characters Real

Here are some tips and tricks to make characters feel round, round and believable.

The very first and most important point is that your characters' dilemma should be clear and real. For a novel to resonate deeply with readers, characters must face dilemmas that feel both tangible and consequential. A character's challenge should not be a vague abstraction but a pressing, realistic problem that demands attention. This dilemma can be external—like a war, a societal barrier, or a dangerous journey—or internal, involving a profound struggle with identity, fear, or moral conflict. What matters most is that the stakes feel authentic and significant, driving the character toward change. Readers should feel the weight of the choice, sensing that whichever path the character chooses will alter their world forever. A clear and real dilemma acts as a narrative backbone, grounding the story and giving each decision impact. When characters are deeply invested in their decisions, readers will be, too.

Here are some techniques to make characters’ dilemmas clear in a novel:

  • Define Specific Stakes: Establish what the character stands to gain or lose with each choice, whether it's a personal relationship, a career, or even their own sense of identity.

  • Ground Dilemmas in Backstory: Use the character’s history, values, or past experiences to shape why this dilemma is uniquely challenging or meaningful to them.

  • Show Emotional Conflict: Use internal monologues, dialogues, or actions to reveal the character's conflicting feelings and how torn they are between possible choices.

  • Add a Time Constraint or Urgency: Introduce a ticking clock or an imminent event to intensify the need for a decision, making the dilemma feel pressing and unavoidable.

  • Use Compelling Contrasts: Set up clear, opposing choices with distinct consequences so readers see exactly what’s at stake with each path the character might take.

  • Make External Pressures Matter: Show how other characters or social forces contribute to the dilemma, adding layers of complexity that make the decision harder and more relatable. Add pressure to the dilemma through others' actions and motivations.

  • Foreshadow Consequences: Hint at potential outcomes of each option, whether through other characters' experiences, subtle narrative clues, or the character’s own intuitions.

Dialogue

- Each character should have a unique voice, speech patterns, and vocabulary that reflect their personality, social background, views and psychology, and their emotional state.
- Use dialogue to convey characters’ thoughts, feelings and intentions as individuals. Dialogue should serve the purpose of characterisation at all times, without exception.
- Use dialogue to flesh out more minor characters, to communicate quickly who they are.
- Dialogue should mimic real speech patterns, including pauses, interruptions, hesitations, dialect and colloquialisms, but remember, people are reading text on a page, so don’t overdo it. Dialogue should always be readable.
- Use dialogue to convey underlying emotions, conflicts, and unspoken tensions, allowing readers to infer deeper motivations. Let your characters tell a lie, and think explain to the reader why they lied. Use your dialogue to show character flaws – don’t let them be boring drips! You would be amazed how many writers fail to do this.

Physical Description

- Draw vivid physical descriptions that outline characters’ appearance, gestures, and body language to help the reader visualize them.
- However, physical description can be used deceptively. Think of femmes fatales in classic noir novels, who look beautiful while hiding a gun in their clutch.
- Use description of how people move and act to convey underlying emotions, conflicts, and unspoken tensions, allowing readers to infer deeper motivations.

The Number One Problem in Character Creation: Depth and Maturity

One of the primary pitfalls in character creation, even in published novels, is the failure to fully develop a mature approach to character, particularly when portraying adults. The challenge lies in crafting mature-thinking adults rather than resorting to simplistic, childlike worldviews and thinking patterns. Characters who lack this can come across as shallow or childish, irritating more sophisticated readers.

It's crucial to imbue adult (even pre-adult) characters with complexity and depth. Avoid the temptation to simplify their perspectives or actions. Avoid childishness or childlike responses. This is a common mistake in new writers, especially in genres such as historical or romance fiction, in which characters are often experiencing the world in a new way or for the first time.

If your 24-year-old heroine in your historical crime thriller stamps her foot and sulks and just demands people just see things her way, you might need to think again.

What About Children As Protagonists?

Henry James provided the masterful example of portraying a child's viewpoint with depth and complexity in What Maisie Knew. Maisie is a young girl caught in the midst of her parents' turbulent divorce. James skilfully captures Maisie's innocence and vulnerability while also making her the uncomplaining, but hard-eyed observer of her parents’ cruelty and selfishness.

In contrast, William Golding's Lord of the Flies offers a disturbing portrayal of children left alone to form a society in the absence of adult supervision. Golding portrays the children not as simple children but as complex, thinking individuals capable of both cruelty, strategy, dread and compassion, and so revealing something of human nature in general.

If you are writing YA or children’s literature, you have to remember that young readers are discerning and in the digital age, no longer living in some idyllic isolation from adult realities. They too are deserving of great, rich, complex characters.

If you’re writing an adult book, then quite simply, write as an adult about adults!

How To Write A Novel Chapter By Chapter available here: https://www.amazon.com/How-Write-Novel-Chapter-Outlining-ebook/dp/B0DJ8TMVWL?ref_=ast_author_mpb

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