002: 3 Tricks for Creating Strong Characters

Strong characters are incredibly important, no matter what genre you write. In this episode, we'll cover three tricks to create strong characters. These are helpful no matter where you are in the drafting process.

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3 Tricks for creating strong characters

Hello, hello. Welcome to episode two, which is kind of officially like episode one. Because Episode One was really an introduction. If you haven't listened to that one, you can go back and check it out. I basically talk about why I wanted to create this podcast and what kinds of content and what kinds of things you can expect from it. So let's dive into creating strong characters. Now that word choice is very intentional. I want to talk about creating strong characters, not likable characters, not relatable characters. The goal of your characters is not necessarily to be likable, you might have some characters who are very likable, and you, you want the reader to like them. But there are a lot of characters out there who are terrible, awful, no good, very bad. Just just not good people. And readers might have very strong negative reactions towards them. And that's fine, that might work really well for your story. So the goal in creating characters is not always to make them likable. And it's not important to make them relatable necessarily either.

So if I'm writing a relatable character that I think is relatable to me, it might not be relatable to you, you're kind of narrowing down. Who that could appeal to. So again, we want to focus on creating strong, believable characters. So here are three tricks to doing that. The first trick is to know your characters inside and out. Now, there's an important disclaimer about this, you don't have to know every single detail about your character. Before you start writing, I suggest doing a little bit of homework before you start writing in the outlining phase. And if you're someone who doesn't do outlines and just prefers to dive in, I still think it's a good idea to do some work and figure out who your character who your characters are, at least who your main character is. 

I have a free character profile template that I will link in the description of this episode that you can access. It's free, I created my own character template that has a list of questions you can ask yourself and some space to write because the ones that I found online were either too focused on like physical description, which, you know, is kind of important. I mean, I guess you need to know like what your character looks like. But they were either too focused on these physical things, or they were really long and had like 150 questions. And I just didn't feel like that was helpful. I didn't want to use a template that was overwhelming. So if you would like a copy of that, you can grab it in the description of this episode. But the key here is not getting so bogged down, by knowing every single detail of your character's backstory, their personality, their mannerisms, their relationships, that it prevents you from actually diving into the story, right? That's what we don't want to happen.

You do not need to spend six months gathering data and figuring out who your characters are, and really stepping inside their heads. No, please don't do that. You can spend whatever length of time you feel like it's going to be different for different people. But don't let that prevent you from actually diving into the story. Because when you start to write, you're probably going to discover a lot more about your characters. That's certainly the case with me. When I get into the story, and I start discovering the story and I just start discovering who these people are and how they respond in different situations in the world of my story, then I feel like I've got that additional layer of clarity around who they are. Okay, so tip number two for creating strong characters is to make sure that your main character especially, but ideally, all of your characters, have a goal slash motivation. What does your main character want?

And it's okay if you haven't started writing and you can't answer that question yet. If you're still figuring out your characters and you're like, I don't know what they want. I don't know what their goal is or what they need. Now there can be a difference between what a character wants versus what they need. The character might be completely oblivious to what they actually need. But you as the writer, know them, they know what's going on, you know, you know, you know what's going on beneath the surface. So for example, let's say that your character wants to find a new partner, like a new romantic partner, let's say they're just really unsatisfied with their current partner, they're like, oh, man, it'd be so much better if I could just start in a new relationship with someone else. Like, you know, there's this cute guy at work, or, I don't know, I want to get back on dating apps, like, that's what they want. But over the course of your story over the course of your novel, you really you know that what that character actually needs is to find fulfillment in their current relationship, they need to work on their communication patterns in order to strengthen the relationship with their current partner. It's just an example, kind of a silly one. But the character again, might not always be aware that those two things are different, that they actually need something entirely different. And this is often the case where your character will start out on a course of action in your plot, because they think they want one thing.

But over the course of the story, as they go through challenges as they go through ups and downs and struggles, they get to a point of realizing, Oh, this thing that I thought I wanted, this thing that was going to make me happy. That's not it, it's actually this whole other thing that I didn't even realize. And again, you as the writer know that. And if it's not clear to you, again, don't worry too much about it right now, don't feel like you have to have all of these things completely figured out before you start to write, I do suggest at least having that clarification between wants and needs figured out. But if you have to just start writing, get to near character. And that will become clear.

Something that I see a lot in work that I take on in my role as a freelance editor is a lot of characters who are very passive. They don't make decisions, they just sort of sit back and are swept along by the action that's happening in the book. They don't have agency, they don't make their own decisions, they're just sort of flat. It is a must, if you want to have strong characters, which everyone who's reading a book should want to have strong characters, you have to have them have agency and make decisions that move the plot forward. When you know your character's goal or motivation, it's also an opportunity for conflict, because if character a wants something very badly, and character B wants the complete opposite, and is fighting for the opposite of that, that's an opportunity for conflict, those two things are naturally going to be in conflict with each other. So that's a way to develop the conflicts further in your story.

Okay, third trick for creating strong characters is to make sure that each character, each of the main characters in your story and really secondary characters is unique. If you have a main character who is a 20 year old college student, and one of the secondary characters is, let's say, their seven year old professor, those two characters are going to move through the world of your story differently. They're probably now not always, I mean, you could mix things up and have things be, you know, kind of unexpected, that would be fun. But generally speaking, a 20 year old college student is going to speak, their dialogue is going to be a lot different than a seven year old professor than how they would speak.

So dialogue is a really good opportunity to show this maybe the 20 year old uses certain kinds of jargon or slang, or speaks in a much different way than the 70 year old professor would. You can also think about I mentioned, you know, how they move through the world. You can think about different mannerisms that you can give your characters you can think about maybe what do they do when they're nervous. Do they have certain habits? Do they tend to, I don't know, use a lot of overly descriptive or exaggerated language, like really identify what it is about each character that makes them unique, readers should not have trouble keeping track of characters, if you write a lot of characters that are very similar to each other, their dialogue all sounds the same. They take action the same way it's going to be hard for the reader to to separate them and differentiate between characters. So that's a good tool just from a reader's perspective. Okay, so those are the three tricks for creating strong characters again,

If you take away nothing else from this episode, take away the fact that yes, it's important to do some research on your characters and sit down and really think about these people. But don't let that stop you from writing. At some point you just got to dive in and if you have to go back and edit some things, if you have to go back and add a little bit more description in the first few chapters or add more, you know, interesting dialogue in your second draft. That's fine. That's part of the editing process. Alright, thank you for listening. I hope this helps as you're creating your characters. See you next week. 

Thank you so much for tuning in.

Katie Wolf