In my previous blog posts, I discussed nine generic types of characters and five common story characters in fiction, but what actually creates a character? What brings them to life off the page for readers and allows them to connect with them on a personal level? What are the things that make readers want to root for them, care for them, relate to them, or make them want to know what happens next in the following chapter? What makes realistic characters? Is it their physical appearance or attributes? Well, not exactly. Although physical attributes are some of the most common descriptions of characters, it's your characters' internal functions and personal experiences that readers will connect with and remember the most. There are 4 main ingredients that create realistic characters, which includes your characters' emotions, motivation, backstory, and personality.
HOW TO MAKE A CHARACTER
Like with a recipe, characters also require special ingredients to become realistic beings that can relate to readers, and especially human-like characters. By adding slices of emotions, a stir of motivation, a pinch of backstory, and a garnish of personality, you can work wonders with your characterization. In particular, human characters should be like real people; as you and me. They shouldn't come off as robots or two-dimensional cardboard cuts, but as third-dimensional, living breathing humans.
As Ernest Hemingway quoted...
🗨️:
"When writing a novel a writer should create living people; people not characters. A character is a caricature.
So, let's open the recipe book of characterization and see how to use the four main ingredients listed above to create realistic characters readers will enjoy!
THE 4 MAIN INGREDIENTS OF REALISTIC CHARACTERS
🍅1. EMOTIONS
Your characters' emotions allow your readers to connect with them on an emotional level and give them a reason to care about them. You can show your characters emotions in various ways, such as their body language or "action beats." These include your characters' emotions, movements, and intentions while they're speaking.
An example of an action beat is as follows:
E.g. His head ignited in flames.
Depending on the situation, the above description could show that the character is angry based on his physical or emotional reaction, rather than blatantly telling the character is angry. Writers can also show their characters emotions by their internal dialogue or their thoughts, which can be used to show their internal conflict, such as fears, insecurities, sorrow, or other emotions caused by external conflict or trauma, crisis, natural disasters, or opposing characters from the outer world.
One example of internal dialogue is as follows:
E.g. John opened the door and sneaked in the house. Oh, I hope I don't wake anyone.
💡Tip #1: ITALICIZE CHARACTERS' THOUGHTS. When placing your characters' thoughts after action beats, be sure to italicize them to distinguish them from regular dialogue in your story and avoid using the word thought as a dialogue tag or placeholder. For example, Where are my car keys? John thought.
A third way of showing your characters emotions is through your diction or word choice, and especially if you're writing in first person point-of-view, as I did in my current novel, The Pact of Freedom. This literary device can help give your characters' distinct voices from one another. You can also use diction if characters have accents, foreign languages, use slang, or to show your characters' culture or perceptions of their worldviews. It can also help them describe different experiences they're going through in the story.
There's a passage from The Pact of Freedom of my female protagonist Millie Crabtree's perspective:
Once my best friend Pearl and I formed our sister blood pact as little girls, I felt as much in bondage as the slaves on my father’s plantation.
Rather than accept life as it was, I wanted the freedom to explore the world, live my dreams, and grasp the pleasures of life, liberty, and happiness. But in the South, this felt like a fantasy—an intangible dream, as I lacked the courage to execute it. Maybe my statements were inconsiderate in a nation that favors the white race, but I saw slavery as inhumane and nothing more than a pit of hell. Having opposing views made me a branded traitor to my own flesh and blood.
From this passage example, the reader learns how Millie compares herself as a slave because of her close friendship with her best friend Pearl and the limitations that Southern white women faced within the 1850s' era. It's also clear how the white townspeople saw her as a traitor because of her Christian, opposing views against slavery.
🥣2. MOTIVATION
Character motivation is the psychological explanation for why your characters do what they do. Like a compass, it directs your characters' steps and are your characters' needs, wants, and overall goals that your characters are trying to accomplish during the course of the story. This ingredient is extremely important because it's what gives your characters purpose for being in the story, and something they're working toward. For example, a desperate father stealing food to feed his family, a woman installing a security system after a neighborhood robbery, or a teenage boy joining a sadistic gang to be cool. Motivation also helps the plot to progress forward, and it also enhances character development, the transformation characters go through during their journeys in the story.
🧂3. BACKSTORY
Character backstory is the past history of characters before the present story begins. This could be a number of different things, such as past events from your characters' childhood, former traumas or experiences in war, repressed memories, or devastations. These character backstories or emotional wounds are also contributing factors to how your characters behave in their present-day lives. A good example of this is from the 1997 film, Miracle in the Woods, starring Della Reese.
In this movie, Lilly Cooper (Della Reese), an elderly woman who lives in a cabin-like house in the woods, is thought to be crazy or senile. But when you learn of her backstory during her younger years, it's evident why she's the way she is in the present-time story and why she thinks the teenage white girl Gina is her old best friend Field Pea (Edith) from her past life because they both favor each other and turns out to be Gina's great-grandmother. This is just one example how backstory is used to clarify a present-time storyline.
(A great family movie! Check out the trailer here, which honestly is almost the whole movie, but oh well. That's how some 90s' movie trailers were back then . . . lol :)
💡Tip #2: BACKSTORY CAN BE HELPFUL FOR FLASHBACK SCENES. Consider using significant, present-time people, places or items to evoke flashbacks and then write narrative summaries or create separate chapters of flashback scenes to show your characters' backstories. (📌Note: Keep flashback scenes or chapters as short as possible for balanced pacing and to quickly return to the present-day storyline.)
🌿4. PERSONALITY
Just like we writers do, our characters should also have distinctive personalities. Everyone has a personality type which developed when our DNA was created before we were born and based on our childhood upbringing and personal backgrounds. If you aren't familiar with the psychology of personality, the following image below is a complete chart of the sixteen MBTI personality types from the Myers and Briggs Personality Indicator, a personality theory created by writers Isabel Myers and Katharine Briggs to help identify a person's personality type based on an introspective self-report questionnaire and the eight cognitive functions discovered by Swiss psychiatrist and psychoanalyst Carl Jung, which includes the following: extraverted sensing, introverted sensing, extraverted intuition, introverted intuition, extraverted thinking, introverted thinking, extraverted feeling, and introverted feeling.
Based off from these cognitive functions, the four most preferred per individual are ultimately what makes up the combinations of the personality types below. Using this system is a good way to give your characters different personalities, as we humans, think, perceive, process of our emotions, and act differently based on our personalities too.
Of course, you don't have to use this psychological system. Simply having your characters behave differently from one another is enough to show their distinctive personalities. For example, a gregarious character won't act the same as a laidback, reserved character. Because of this, it's also a good idea to monitor how much your characters speak within the scenes of your stories and ensure they act naturally and not out of character. Although we writers are responsible for "putting our characters through the wringer," make sure you also always respect them for who they are.
💡Tip #3: DISTINGUISH YOUR CHARACTERS' REACTIONS AND EXPRESSIONS. By giving your characters' distinctive personalities, consider also adding differences between their emotional reactions and physical expressions when experiencing their emotions. For example, two characters may act differently when expressing anger, sadness, happiness etc. One character may grit their teeth when angry, while another may cry from frustration.
📣CLOSING REMARKS:
Creating characters is one thing, but creating realistic characters requires more details than physical attributes or appearance. So, if you want to create realistic characters, keep in mind to have your characters' emotions be able to relate and connect with your readers, give your characters goals or purposes to motivate them in the story, give them backstories or past histories to contribute to their present-time lives, and allow your characters to have distinctive personalities from one another. Adding these four main ingredients will allow you to create a tasty recipe of a compelling story and memorable characters your readers will thoroughly enjoy in all of your books. Well, that wraps it up. If you found this latest post helpful, give it a like (heart ❤️️) and feel free to share your thoughts and comments below. 💬)
Happy Writing! 😊✍🏽💻
🤔Which of the four ingredients do you think is the most important for creating realistic characters?
🍅Emotions
🥣 Motivation
🧂 Backstory
🌿 Personality
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