I’ve been going through some old emails and found one from six years ago where a fan asked me about characterization and how to make their characters as cool as mine. It was a very short email with a simple-yet-daunting question, and I when I came across it in the present, I was like, “Whoa, how did I answer this one?”
LIKE THIS. I answered it LIKE THIS, which is basically everything I know about characterization boiled down and condensed into about 1,000 words. This was probably an insane amount of work to have put into answering an email, but I’m a sucker for craft-related questions. Anyway, I thought this might be useful for other people, either as aspiring writers or as readers who enjoy seeing how the sausage gets made.
I’ll do my best to answer your question, though I’m sure I’ll end up leaving something out. It’s been a long time since I really thought about this, and there’s not necessarily one right answer on how to make good characters. Though I will say I wasn’t always good at it, or at writing stories in general, so you will get a lot better with practice. It gets easier, and eventually all the skills and techniques you agonized over will just be second nature and you won’t even have to think about them. But in the meantime…
–Don’t be afraid to make your characters flawed or have negative, “unlikable” traits. I once wrote a book where I was so afraid of messing up the main characters that they ended up being really boring and blah, and the bad guys turned out way more interesting, because I wasn’t afraid to give them personalities or have them make mistakes or do things that might make people not like them. If you’ve read Renegade X, then you might have noticed that Damien is pretty flawed, and I’ve found that the more flaws my characters have, the more likable they are, both to me and to my readers.
–Make sure your characters all want something. The protagonist especially. Give them mutually exclusive wants, which basically means making them want two different things, but they can only ever have one. In Renegade X, Damien constantly strives to be himself, and to fit in, but by being himself–both/neither hero/villain–he doesn’t fit into their society, and he’ll also never give up who he is in order to fit in. He wants both, but he can’t have them. That’s just one example, and that’s more broad, because in each book he’ll have something more specific he wants that he can’t have. Protagonists have both an outer desire, something that they want, and an inner desire, which is something that they need. Usually throughout the story, they go after the thing they want, which they may or may not get, only to discover that it’s not what they actually need. If that sounds too complicated, then just focus on giving them goals for now and finding ways to thwart them from getting it. If you have an antagonist, they’ll have wants that they’re trying to get, too, sometimes the same thing as the protagonist, except the antagonist isn’t willing to grow and change to get them. That’s another thing–characters need to grow and change throughout the story.
–Set up things your characters would never, ever do or an obstacle they absolutely don’t want to face and then find a reason why they have to do that thing or face that obstacle. Just make sure you set it up first so the audience knows about it. Otherwise, it won’t mean anything to us. Examples: someone who’s terrified of bees having to walk through a field of beehives to save a loved one, or someone who’s always really mean showing kindness to someone.
–Make sure nobody in your story gets anything too easily. It will feel off and suck all the tension out of the story if people suddenly get things or accomplish their goals too easily, even if they’re small. And make sure that interactions between various characters make sense. Like, if a character asks their mom for a glass of water, it’s not weird for her to give them the water, but if they ask their worst enemy for it and they’re like, “Yeah, sure,” it will feel weird. (This is a super simple, obvious example that probably wouldn’t happen in anyone’s story, but hopefully it gets the point across.)
–Don’t show things that don’t involve conflict. Stories need conflict (what conflict is exactly can be hard to describe, because it doesn’t mean fighting, it just means, like, making things difficult for your characters), and if something happens in your story that goes well and nothing bad happens, that’s fine, but don’t show it. Just skip over it. If two characters go on a date and it goes well, we don’t need to see it. If they go on a date and something really embarrassing happens, we definitely need to see that. (Well, not *definitely*, because there might be times where it’s more fun to hear about it. Use your best judgment and stick to what feels right to you.)
Present-Day Chelsea here to add: I still find “conflict” hard to define in terms of what makes for good story. A better word might be “friction” or even just “change.” If everything is exactly the same about the characters and their world when we end a scene as when we went into it, if it doesn’t further the story in any way, whether that’s changing someone’s opinion, their thoughts, their relationships, moving the story along in some way, then leave it out. And if there’s a scene you desperately want to write about, but you don’t think it’s doing any of those things, add something or combine it with something that does. Okay, back to the original email…
–Give your characters thoughts and opinions and have them express them. Share them with the audience, if not the other characters, though you’ll probably do both. Every line in your story is a chance to build on characterization, whether it’s dialogue or describing the people and things around them.
–Make it so if you flipped to a random page and read a line of dialogue, you’d know who was speaking just by their personality. This is one I’m not sure I actually accomplish all the time, but it’s worth striving for. You don’t need to make your characters sound wildly different, just pay attention to how their experiences and ways of thinking influence what they say and how they say it.
–Stories are about choices. Keep giving your character choices to make, especially difficult ones.
–Ask yourself what’s the worst thing that could happen to your character and what’s the worst time for it to happen. Fun stuff, though. Not, like, oh, the worst thing that could happen is if all their friends die or something, because obviously that’s too awful and it’s not story specific. I mean, there are stories where that could make sense as the thing that’s going wrong for them, but you know what I mean.
I don’t know if I have any superhero-genre specific tips. I gave Damien flight because it was the last thing he wanted to have happen, and then I gave him lightning because, at the time, that was the last thing he wanted to have happen, too. In both cases, they screwed up his life. (If he’d gotten lightning first, it wouldn’t have felt like a bad thing to him.) I made him have a superhero dad and have to go live with him because it wasn’t what he wanted. Some of that’s story more than character, but it all bleeds together.
Some books that I read that basically taught me everything I know:
–Writing the Breakout Novel by Donald Maass (there’s a workbook, too–definitely worth going through all the exercises). These two books taught me a lot about characterization and story.
–Save the Cat! by Blake Snyder (and the other two books in the series). These books are great for learning about story structure. They’re for screenwriting, but they apply to novels as well.