Story Starts with Character
Story Starts with Character
Know your characters, know your story
The Story Writer’s Path
Know your characters, know your story
Quick, think of the last story you read, or watched.
What is the first thing you think of?
Odds are good it wasn’t the setting, or the theme, or even the plot.
Instead, I bet you’d tell me about a character, or several. “There was this funny bookseller who found a dead body and figured out the murder,” you might say. Or, “Two people met when her car broke down and hated each other on first sight — but then they fell in love.” Or, “There was a woman on a train who had a problem with alcohol and she started stalking people she saw from the window.”
Like that, right?
Character is the first thing you think of when you think of story because characters drive story. Stories aren’t about inanimate objects in a setting. They are about people. And if authors do their work right, readers will think of their characters as real people who leap off the page and into our consciousness.
Last summer I attended the Romance Writers of America conference in New York City and heard a talk by mega-bestselling writer J.R. Ward. She emphasized that she thinks of her characters as people and said she thought every author should. Because if they aren’t people to you, the author, they will be dead on the page.
And nobody wants that. We want characters that feel like they truly do live and breathe. Characters that people will talk about as they press your book into a friend’s hand. Characters that are as real as your spouse, or your best friend.
So how in the heck do we make that happen?
Creating characters
Characters often begin as an image in an author’s head. You see a woman wearing a long red cape and boots striding down the sidewalk and wonder what she’s doing. Or maybe you see a young man in a stocking cap sitting in a coffee shop in animated conversation. What’s he talking about that’s so important?
A good starting point, then, can be noting the external details of your character. I’m a fan of creating a character dossier, not only for figuring appearances out, but also for future reference. (You’d be surprised how hard it is to remember your hero’s eye color midway through your draft.)
Appearance
Start with the basics, like hair color, eye color, skin tone, habitual expressions and mannerisms, height, build, the way he walks. Add in clothing style, and any extras such as if she wears glasses all the time or sometimes, preferences in perfume (or not), etc.
Add in the basics and then any tics or habits you might know. As you build the character’s outer details, you will start to have questions. Okay, your hero wears a perpetual frown. Why? What is he so negative about? As you note details about your character, more will emerge.
Name
Naming your character dictates aspects of their personality as well. Names can indicate age, for instance, as naming goes through trends. You can search the social security popular name database for decades to find an appropriate name for the age of your character. Sometimes names match a character exactly, and sometimes it can be the opposite. How many times in real life have you met somebody who looked and acted exactly like their name? Or not. Both examples will shape character. If you are struggling to find names, enter “baby names” into Google. There are dozens of sites to help you.
Surroundings
What does your character’s home look like? Is it full of heavy, old, antiques or light, bright modern furniture? Does she live in an apartment or on an estate? You can draw a blueprint to guide you if you desire.
Move on to her work environment. Does he labor on a farm? Or work from a cubicle in a high-rise in the city? Does she decorate her space with family photos or keep it pristine?
Finally, does your character have a third space? This is a place that isn’t home, isn’t work, but rather a spot she likes to hang out. It might be a coffee shop or a bar or a cafe, or even a community center or church.
All these choices reflect character and defining them can give you insight into yours.
Backstory
Now you can start looking at your character’s past. A good way to do this is with a timeline. Figure out your character’s age and the year the story takes place and work backward from there. What were the big events in his life? When did he graduate from college, decide to ditch school and travel the world, start her business, have children, the dates a parent died and so on. Making a timeline of crucial events can help you to start learning your character’s personality.
What does your character want?
Writing 101 teaches that every story begins with a character who wants something he or she can’t get. The story proceeds as the character tries in a variety of ways to get the desired thing, facing obstacles that get more difficult as she advances down her path. Until, finally, at the end — she achieves her desire. Or maybe not. Maybe she gets something better.
Or maybe, just maybe, she gets what she didn’t know she needed.
Internal versus external
So a logical starting point for creating a character is to define what she wants. And this can be surprisingly hard. Hopefully, some ideas sprang forth as you noted details of her appearance and backstory. It’s helpful to think in terms of internal desires and external desires. Your main character will likely have an external desire that drives him, such as must buy the land on the neighboring property in order to build his development, or want to catch a crook, or must advance through the corporate ranks to get a promotion.
But for each external desire, there’s an internal one that drives it. This is the why and it’s story gold because it operates in the background as your character strives to attain her goal. Perhaps he wants to build his development to prove to his father he can be successful. He wants to catch the crook so he can demonstrate his intelligence to a potential love interest. She wants to win that promotion to prove to her ex-husband that she really does have what it takes.
Wound + Lie
None of us make it to adulthood unscathed. Including your character. Especially your character. You want to torture your character with things that have happened to her in the past. And don’t make them good things.
Your characters all carry internal wounds from childhood or adolescence. Like external wounds, the internal ones get scabbed over with coping mechanisms that allow us to get through life. These coping mechanisms are the lies we adopt to cover up the wound. And the wound is what characters subconsciously operate from. For example, victims of a house fire may not allow themselves not to get too attached to any person or thing because of the fear it will just be destroyed. (Example taken from The Emotional Wound Thesaurus, an excellent reference book for this kind of character work.)
Personality systems
It can also be fun to use theories of personality to enhance your characters. Figure out your hero’s astrological sign for insight into his actions. Or try Meyers-Briggs typing, or the Enneagram, or the five elements. You can even use tarot cards to gain insight into your characters.
Putting it into play
Remember, not all of this will come at once. If it does, you’re a very lucky writer indeed. As your progress through your discovery draft, setting your characters in action, you’ll learn more and more about their backstories, their wounds, and their motivations. You don’t have to know every single thing about your character as you begin writing.
And remember also to feed in the information you have gleaned about your characters through dialogue, action, and scene when possible. Information dumps are boring to readers, though you can legit bring in backstory in a character’s mind as she remembers things from her past. Just do it in moderation!