forum Creating Well-Rounded Characters: Help!!!

Started February 22, 2020 by @bisrid

tune

So I've been working on my novel for a little over two years now. Most of that wasn't actually writing per se, just kind of building the world and plotline and whatnot. But even so I feel like my characters are a bit two-dimensional. And maybe it's just me being overly critical of my own work (as many of us often are), but I figured I'd ask the masses for some advice! What do you all do to create more well-rounded characters? Like what kind of questions do you ask, what attributes do you focus on, any sort of writing exercises? Literally anything would help me :')

Danke schön,
B.I.

Hi there! I totally feel you on that, I’ve struggled a lot with making my characters feel like real people to me. One thing that’s helped me a lot is the idea of “Character X has Y belief or trait. In what case would Character X abandon or go against Y?” Basically, what are your characters going to make exceptions for, and in what part of their lives can they tend to be hypocrites? For example, my boy Crumpledunk is all about following the rules. However, he always ends up accidentally breaking the rules and getting positive results, which he dismisses as flukes or somehow being wrong anyways because it wasn’t achieved ‘the right way’. Characters feel a lot more real if they have some contradictions in their personalities, at least to me, and it’s always fun to try and show the little quirks that most people do have.

Another thing that helps me is having conversations with my characters out loud or trying to speak with their voice. It can be a little awkward at first, but it’s really helped me in creating a unique feeling for my characters and understanding them a bit better. Sorry if this is a dumb idea! I just really enjoy doing it, probably more than I should.

Hopefully at least some part of this helped you! Have a great day and good luck in all of your writing endeavors :)

Wow those are both great ideas!! Thank you! And that's not dumb at all, I think out loud as it is anyways so that'll actually help me be more productive probably! :D

So one thing I’ve learned is that creating well rounded and developed characters doesn’t have a set way of doing so! Many people think there is a certain way of going about creating characters, but there’s not! It’s important for everyone to remember that they should do what works best for them, like the previous commenter for example! They like to role play as their characters! That’s fun! But I bet many people do things differently! So all you have to do is find what works best for you!

One thing that I personally like to do is find character sheets online and fill them out! Some of the questions on them are actually really interesting and helpful, they make me think.
I also like to ask questions to my characters, but in text form and answer back, also in text form, the way they would answer. So for example; I would write “What is your biggest fear?” And each of my characters would respond! So then my main character, Ivy, would say something like “Hmm, I don’t know for sure! There’s a lot of things that scare me! But if I had to choose, I guess I would say… not leaving my mark on the world!” And so on and so forth.

Well rounded characters change over time, they have to feel like you (the writer) has been writing this character down as if they’re your best friend in real life. You really want to dive into their conscious. Find out what breaks them. What makes them go against everything they stand for? What would just set them off? What do they want most in life and how can you make it harder for them to reach that? And most importantly, what do they learn from those trials?

I hope some of this made sense haha, it’s midnight and I’m just writing whatever comes to mind lol, but I hope I helped a bit!
Good luck!~

so I actually spent a bunch of time researching this because I'm also very self-conscious about my characters
something I found really helpful was from this book called "Understanding Fiction":

In other words, when the writer thinks of a character, he cannot think of him simply as a static portrait, or a psychological description… He must, rather, think of him as a complex of potentialities for action. A character is a complex of potentialities for action, for many different kinds of action, but not for all kinds of action, only for certain kinds of action which can finally be rendered consistent with each other. A hero may become a villain, or a villain a hero, but the reader must not be permitted to feel that such changes are arbitrary, that they represent real contradictions; rather, he must be made to feel that both kinds of action, the good and the bad, were potential in the character and are consistent with each other.

which just helped with my approach when it comes to creating characters? I kind of used to approach it like attaching a laundry list of character traits to a blank board and hoping something would stick.

whereas with this in mind, I can approach a character as this mess of potential decisions and ask "what would you never do, under any circumstances, ever?" and then try to understand why.

something that's also helped me is to try and figure out
1) how the character sees themselves
2) how the character thinks other people see them
3) how other people actually see the character
4) and how different 1, 2 and 3 are from what the character is actually like

because people are messy, and people aren't always self-aware. and it just adds whole new layers to characters that I've found make them seem more believable, if that makes sense.
so for example, take a random character A who
1) thinks their biggest flaw is that they don't love their friends well enough
2) thinks their friends see that as well, but are too good to say it to their face
3) other people actually think that character A is too self-sacrificing and doesn't let others take care of them
4) in reality, character A's biggest flaw is probably their weird mixture of pride and low self-esteem which results in a need to always take on everything on their own rather than sharing the burden (idk, this is just an example)

and in this case, you can have a delightful scenario where character A is determined to overcome what they perceive as their greatest flaw, without telling anyone about it because they don't share their burdens, by making increasingly dangerous attempts at protecting their loved ones. who, of course, get frustrated because they don't want character A constantly running into battle for them. but the more their friends tell A to slow down, the more A is convinced that they're a bad friend, which just creates an endless feedback loop.

and boom, we have 4 new layers of complexity in a character's storyline, just from considering the weird dynamic of self-perception and group identity.

so yeah. sorry for the essay-length response haha

thank you all so so much! you have given me a lot to think about and I really appreciate it! i'll for sure be working on these things!

I read a tip the other day that went something along the lines of "write down 20 things about the character that the Reader might never know" because it'll naturally bleed into your writing and flesh out your character

oh that's really interesting @Torpion ! I hadn't thought of that before! thanks!

I like to focus on how other people see them, what rumours are going around about them, what secrets they have (both big and small), and above all, I always ask why they have a certain trait even if the reason isn't always profound (example: they like eating fish. Why? Because it's salty). Especially when it comes to flaws I think it's really important to elaborate on why something is a flaw because it all depends on how the person channels it. Anger is often a flaw I see in character descriptions without an explanation. Sure anger is a word that we see as having a negative vibe, but if this anger manifests in them aggressively building birdhouses…. It can't really be called a flaw because it is expressed in a way that is positive and constructive.