How to Make Your
Characters Believable
My tag line is no joke: I write non-fiction by means of
fiction.
Readers tell me about their desperate searches to find
fictional places that I have created on maps, and about their realizations that
my latest novel could fit into the 19
th, 20
th, or 21
st
centuries equally well.
Yet the real key to connecting to in a reader's mind is by
connecting the reader to real people – characters who are believable, even
though they are fictional. There are
three solid steps to achieving this character-building goal:
1. First get clear on your story, and that your story and
the stories of those in your comfort zone are not the only real and important
stories.
It is so easy nowadays to be isolated in our thinking except
for the echo chamber of like-minded voices, and to substitute caricatures for
those outside the echo chamber. This is
a terrible trap for a writer in an increasingly diversifying world of readers
and competing authors. The way to avoid
the trap is to get clear on the strengths, limitations, and validity of your
story while recognizing it is just the starting place of your character
building. Everyone isn't like you, and
that is good: you will have a more successful writing career if you don't have
always to write characters that read like you are interacting with yourself.
2.
Immerse yourself in the stories of others from all
walks of life, and in accounts of how people come together and behave in
different situations.
Step 2 comes after step 1 because in order to do step 2
effectively, you must listen to the stories of the lives of others in the
mindset of seeking understanding, not confirmation of your existing
viewpoints. It is not necessary that you
agree with everything you hear and every choice that people make, but that you
listen without bias so you learn the realities of of the lives, behaviors, and
choices of all types of people.
The most authentic way of learning a lot of true stories
from real people is to find ways to introduce yourself to random people, invite
them to tell their stories, and just listen.
An alternative way to find all kinds of real people doing and
experiencing all kinds of real things in all kinds of real places is to go on
to YouTube, read biographies and historical accounts, and to take in current
events from a variety of news sources and commentaries with the mindset of
listening to learn the different kinds of real people there are, how they act,
how they behave, what they believe, who and what they love and hate, and why.
Do deeper studies on people you feel are remarkable – good
and bad – to find out what they believe, what they value, what they have
experienced, things they or others around them might have said about a
particular situation. Find out what
makes main characters in real life tick, and tick exactly they way they do in
certain situations. Research the lives
of people with similar experiences, beliefs, and values to see if these
real-life main characters are remarkable because of or in spite of those they
are most similar to.
3.
Write short stories placing real personalities you
have learned about in a fictional situation, and also short stories placing
fictional characters in a real situation you have learned about, for practice.
You know your starting place and how you would handle any
situation X, but after applying yourself to the previous two steps, you will
also sense that there are a variety of other ways real character Y and then
fictional character Z could behave. The
key, as you learn, is to be writing every day about the people whose stories
you learn – just a short story of your own to bounce real knowledge of real
people through your imagination of both real and fictional events. Over time, you will learn to create authentic
characters based on this real knowledge for any situation you choose to create,
authentic characters guided by the real personalities and experiences you have
based them on.
AUTHOR Deeann D.
Mathews is an author, musician, and fractal artist, from San Francisco, CA. She
is the author of Black, White, and RED All Over, the first in a series of clean
Christian mysteries, and also the author of Seasons Siblings' Timeshare Tiff, a
fictional take on the famous fall weather of her hometown. She is also the
creative director of Praising Pilgrims Music, a small publishing company of
music and music-related materials based in San Francisco, California. Ms.
Mathews is also actively creating fractal art and other creative works across a
variety of disciplines on Peakd.com.
Black, White, and RED All Over
Buy on AMAZON
Kindle $2.99
Paper $20
