forum How do I make my character seem alive?

Started February 11, 2021 by Deleted user

tune

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So, I have 9 characters, but none of them seem like real people… they just feel like words strung together to make a tapestry in the form of a humanoid shape. (excuse my deep 13yr old poetry) how do I make them feel real?

1. Your characters are more than just pawns that need to end the conflict of your book. Think about the lives that they may lead that are not connected to the plot. Do they have any unique interests? Hobbies? What is their relationship with their parents, siblings, other people?
2. The flaws should be as important as virtues. If you have a character whose purpose in the story is to defeat an evil wizard, it's expected that they're strong, brave, and can easily fight with dangerous weapons. What are their weaknesses? "What about fear of thunderstorms". Well, there's a better way to give your characters flaws.
   We said our hero is strong, right? He can lift 70 kilos with one hand, that's impressive. But what if he can do it only for less than a minute, and gets easily exhausted? Good luck on that.
   Brave? Always running into fire? That's recklessness. Another flaw is here.
   Fighting with dangerous weapons? That's a really good advantage. But what if the wizard is immune to all physical wounds and the only thing that's able to stop him is an honest conversation? And our hero is hopeless in that?
   When you create flaws, base them upon your character's virtues. Every obstacle made this way - physical, mental, emotional - is always better than picking up a random flaw and sticking it on your character.
3. Your characters should have more than one goal. Imagine that one of them wants to confess their love to someone, which is the main plot of the book. But they also like cooking and they want to enter a competition. And maybe they also want their cat to get over a disease. Now you can make more conflicts. They want to save money for the medicine, but also they need to practice their cooking, so they need to buy ingredients…

A good way to get to know your characters better is to do some questionaries. You'll find a lot of them on the Internet. That's all I have to say for now. If you have any more questions, I'm here. Good luck!

hi

I think that @tomat has some great points, and most of what I have to say is really just expanding on what they've already said. But anyways

• I think that a balances between positive and negative traits is super important. An overpowered character who's adored by everyone and perfect in every way is not so fun to read about, but neither is a character who is mean, unlikeable and really incompetent at everything (and also equally unrealistic).
• A backstory can be really crucial to developing your character. Like, I feel like a lot of new writers will just kind of assign personality traits to their characters (Idk if you're a new writer, but I 100% used to do this). A better way to approach it would be figuring out their backstory and using it to determine why they are the way they are.
• Put your characters in situations that will put them out of their comfort zone. This doesn't have to be a life or death situation- maybe they just hate public speaking but need to make an important speech. But everyone has limits and everyone is going to deal with things differently.

I feel like I probably have more tips, but that about covers the main points. Hope this helps.

I have this weird thing where i pick up on quirks and tics real people have and recycling them into characters. having characters with imperfections (crooked teeth, acne) make them seem more human. Writing dialogue in the way your character would say it, if the character has a hick country accent, write there dialogue like that (e.i. "What do you mean?" "What'd ya mean?"

Character mistakes are key through cutting through a lot of fluff. It makes a big difference between career authors and hobby writers. For example, a hero who has a lot of adventures and wins every time is cool for a while but then gets repetitive. However, if the hero makes many mistakes or one big mistake at the beginning of the story, it sets you up for character development so that you can focus on that for a plotline, which is 1) easier to read and relate to and 2) opens up a whole bunch of story avenues you can explore that you previously wouldn't have if you'd stuck with fluff. Hope it kinda helped.

@girlslikegirls From your experience of being alive, what makes others alive to you? What makes you alive to yourself?

The look of the human tapestry can be very subtle in influencing the character…even if the character doesn't live in front of a mirror or think about how they look, the people around them can react to how somebody looks in a way that changes a person's behavior…And sometimes, nobody in this whole society-and-identity process even knows it! If they're tall and everybody thinks that makes them a natural leader, then that tall character can either learn to behave as very entitled or that tall character becomes shy and learns to slouch or shrink, or something else.

From your experience of being alive, what makes you say the things that you say? What makes you feel your emotions and think your thoughts? And how much can you imagine somebody having different thoughts and feelings than you?

Because the temperament of a person or character can make them act differently than another character would act. If four different characters were shouted at with, "Move over, useless!" Then one character might cry because their personality is very sensitive and they're afraid of rejection or people being mean to them…but two characters might argue or fight with whoever insulted them—and do so for different reasons, like maybe one thinks, 'An argument! This will be fun to win an argument!' whereas the other is motivated more by feeling angry and wanting to harm the person who insulted them and not at all for fun. And a fourth character might react with, "That's weird. I'm not useless, and I'm not even in the way." So that fourth one seems to not react, or goes away because the situation is confusing…but this fourth character doesn't cry.

Some of this comes from experience with people, but if you like writing and storytelling then you probably like reading or watching television. Rest assured that some very successful works of literature have "flat" characters, I noticed that The Phantom of the Opera novel by Gaston Leroux was very much about the plot and generally had flat characters…and I have been told that The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe had flat characters who sounded the same as one another and had unrealistic motives (Turkish delight, Edmund? Really? You betrayed your family for the worst-tasting dessert on earth, are you serious?)…but I didn't mind, because the Pevensie siblings lived and grew up together, so of course they would talk the same way, and maybe the author was going more for what's called Character Archetypes rather than true-to-life these-could-be-people-I-go-to-school-with.

Character Archetypes are "flat" characters but we like reading about them anyway: the heroic hero, the trickster, the one who knows things (like a witch or a hermit, mentor type of character) and many more.

But if there's a story that you do enjoy because the characters are alive to you, then you can analyze why that is…what did the author do with the words to make that tapestry three-dimensional?