A NaNoCRATE

#18 • CRAFTING MEMORABLE CHARACTERS

Stressing out about your characters? These tips from Charlie Jane Anders may help!

There's no silver bullet or easy formula for creating characters who live and breathe inside your head (and hopefully other people's heads, too). If there were, we'd all be using it and it wouldn't be such a nightmare.

I struggle with this all the time — I'll have a story reach an eighth or ninth draft before I realize that a major character is still basically a scrap of paper, carried along through the story on the wind.

And after years of grappling with this issue, I've come up with some things can help me to imagine the character as a real, separate individual instead of a function of the plot or story.

So here are some ideas and tips that might make your characters come to life more easily:

1) Character Is Action

This is the maxim that I've basically tried to live by for the past few years, and I kind of want to get it made into a banner that I can hang over my computer. Your characters can be witty and spout interesting philosophies, and have cool names and awesome fashion sense — but in the end, they are what they do. We judge people by their actions (with the caveat that speech can be an action, too.)

So when you're coming up with characters to populate your world, don't think of types of people or cool ideas — try to think in terms of people who do stuff. And if your characters are just sitting around spouting witty one-liners for page after page, but not getting off their butts and doing something, then they're probably not such interesting characters after all.

(And yes, even if you're writing a drawing-room novel in which conversation is the main event, that conversation should still involve people interacting in ways that move the story forward.)

2) Surprising Acts

And following on from that — the most compelling characters are often the ones who do something unexpected. And when you first create a character, you need a "hook" to get yourself interested in them — because a lot of creating a character is actually making yourself curious about him/her.

You, the writer, have to want to know more about this person, and then you can make your reader want to know more, too. So one way to do that is to imagine a character who does something completely wild and goes off the map, something that nobody else would ever do.

And then try to imagine what would motivate someone to behave that way, and what sort of person does that sort of thing.

3) Weird Contradictions

Again, a lot of inventing people, and having them take on a life of their own, is making yourself curious about them. And one thing that can make you wonder about someone is their personal contradictions — in real life, as well as fiction. When you meet a Vegan who wears leather, you want to know more about why they refuse to eat animal products but they wear animal skins. That's a somewhat extreme example, but almost everybody has contradictions between their beliefs and actions, or between two different ideas they subscribe to.

4) One Detail Can Be Your Way In

If it's a vivid enough detail. Especially for a supporting character, a single striking detail (like a jewel that this person wears, or an odd habit they have) can make them stick in your mind.

But even for your main character, a single interesting detail about her or his appearance, or a habit of speech (a catch-phrase?) can make them a lot more vivid to you.

In a lot of ways, this is like trying to remember someone you used to know years ago — anything that brings them into focus in your head is helpful.