Adam Croft

When you’re writing a story, you generally have two different places you can start from: the story or the characters. Whether you start with a plot and then develop characters to tell it, or begin with a really exciting character you later build a story around, at some point you’re going to be spending a lot of time with your characters. For this reason, it’s vital that all of your characters – not just your protagonist – are three-dimensional and enhance what you write.

1. Give them goals

One way to do this is to give your characters goals, whether they’re the protagonist or not. It can be useful to remember that everyone is the main character inside their own heads, so it’s unlikely that a subsidiary character would be acting in a particular way solely because of the main character. Give them something to aim for, even if not much is said about it, so their personal journey makes up part of the story.

2. Give them flaws

It’s also important to give characters flaws – after all, no one is perfect. Think about what their weaknesses might be and how you can portray them through their actions. There’s no need to be blatant about it, particularly if the character doesn’t have much to do, but it helps to make them interesting and your story more believable.

3. Think how they view themselves

Thinking about how your characters view themselves is a good way of adding depth to them. Often, the image people carry around about themselves is different to how they are seem by others around them, so this can be a good source of tension within the story. This can be done through having an ‘unreliable narrator’ as your protagonist, or just by dropping in little hints about their inherent conflicts.

4. Make sure they’re not just a plot device

One really important thing to consider when you’re developing your characters is to make sure they’re not just there as a plot device. You’ll probably be able to tell pretty easily if they are – the things they do and say will seem wooden in comparison to everything else that’s going on. This problem is probably the most serious if you find that your protagonist is just a plot device – if the reader can’t believe in your main character, then something’s not gone right. Focusing on the character’s motivations can help to flesh them out.

5. Finish their journey properly

A final way of making your characters stronger is to make sure they finish their journeys properly. This doesn’t necessarily mean that all the loose ends of your story have to be wrapped up to finish happily ever after, but being able to chart a course as to where you character began and where they end up will help to add both depth and closure.

Having strong, well-written characters is really important to the success of a story. After all, think about television – if we don’t care about the characters, we don’t watch. It’s pretty much the same with books; you could have the most exciting story ever, but if you don’t have the characters to match, you run the risk of the whole thing falling a little flat. We’ve all created slightly dodgy, wooden characters at one time or another. The trick is figuring out how to avoid the same mistakes again. Feel free to share your thoughts below.

One of the most challenging and fun aspects of writing a novel is developing your characters and creating an entire new life and history based on your imagination. How do you create your characters? Do you let them develop as you write the story or do you plan their personalities and intricacies in advance? Earlier today I came across a fantastic resource for character creation: The 100 Most Important Things To Know About Your Character. Take a look and print out a few copies!