Hi everyone, I hope you’re all having great, productive days! Seeing as I had a little bit of spare time this morning I decided to spend it writing a follow up to an earlier post, 5 Tips for Creating Great Characters. So, without further ado here’s:

5 More Tips for Creating Great Characters

1 Know your Characters’ Psychology
Knowing how your characters’ minds work can help you to figure out how they will act in certain situations and in turn, this can help you to figure out what their arc will be throughout the course of the story. For example, are they logical thinkers, easily seeing the best way to deal with a tricky situation? Or do they act on impulse, often making a difficult situation worse? Knowing this sort of information can help you get to grips with who your characters are as ‘people’.

2 Create Contradictions
In real life, people are walking contradictions, and so your characters should be too. Contradictions help to make characters interesting and relatable, and they add more depth and believability. Contradictions can also lend themselves to plot development, as well as revealing information about your characters. For example, a character who is a hero would usually be brave and strong-willed, but what if you give your hero character an anxiety disorder that they must overcome in order to save the day? Another example might be a character who has landed their dream job as head chef in a high-end restaurant, a job for which they’ve trained for years – but what if the character has issues with food? you can see how by adding this little character contradiction, new plot-leads jump out.

3 Pastimes
Don’t forget to think about what your characters’ hobbies and passions might be. Just like real people, what a character does in their spare time or what they do for fun can say a lot about them. For example, the fact that a character likes to do crossword puzzles might hint at their intelligence or the fact that a character likes to go for a run to help them relax might hint at their physical appearance.

4 Give a Reason
Remember that nobody does anything just for the sake of doing it – there should be a reason behind everything your characters say and do.

5 Be Vivid with Description
When you are describing your characters, it is a good idea to pick out the most vivid details about them – perhaps the things that you’d notice about them first if they were to come to life walk into the room. It can be helpful to focus on two or three of the strongest details, allowing the reader to fill in the rest with their own imagination.

As always, thank you for spending your time with my words, it really means a lot!

Until next time,

George

© 2019 GLT

Categories: Characters

Tags: 5 tips for Creating Great Characters, character, Characters, contradictions, description, pastimes, psychology, tips, Writer, writing