How to Write a Novel: Character: Who is the story about?
“People are more interested in people than anything else.”
—Bob Mayer, The Novel Writer’s Toolkit
Characters are the heart of fiction. If you consider any memorable book, film, or TV series, it will often be the characters you remember most, along with the feelings or emotional resonances you experienced along the way.
You need all kinds of characters in your story, but how you create them and when they emerge in your writing process is up to you.
Some writers produce reams of character notes before they start, including details, from favorite color to how they got the scar on their lower back, that may not even appear in the book.
Others start with plot or theme or setting and create a character to fit the story later.
You can’t tell from a finished novel which way the writer created their characters, and there is no one correct way to go about it, but there are some fundamentals to consider.
Who are the different characters in your story?
Your protagonist is the main character and is introduced at the beginning or at least early in the book, so the reader knows who they are and understands their significance.
They are usually interesting in some way, or might have special skills, or if they are a ‘normal’ person, they develop into something more that makes them special during the book.
Much of the book will be written from their point of view (a topic covered in more detail in the next chapter) so choose or create your protagonist based on the most interesting perspective for your story.
You can have multiple protagonists, but this can complicate the story considerably. If this is your first novel, consider using a single protagonist, which will make the book easier to write and finish. The Hunger Games is a great example of a successful novel with a single protagonist. There are other characters, but Katniss Everdeen is the clear protagonist.
Your antagonist is the character who tries to stop the protagonist from getting what they want, and they need a believable motivation for their actions and approach. The antagonist doesn’t have to be a person, however. In the classic ’90s disaster movie Armageddon, the primary antagonist is the asteroid that will destroy Earth.
You also need secondary characters, and these will depend on the needs of your story and your genre. There might be a sidekick, a mentor, a love interest, a team of some kind, or a friendship group.
You need a bigger cast of characters if you want to kill off some of them along the way. A Game of Thrones is a great example of this.
You might also want to spin off secondary characters into their own books, where they are the protagonist. Romance authors do this really well. In the Bridgerton books and TV show, each of the siblings is the protagonist of their specific story, and a secondary character in the other books. This strategy keeps readers hooked into wanting to know what happens to them all.
Readers must want to spend time with the character/s
If you write characters that readers care about or are interested in, they will forgive a lot of other things about the story.
The characters don’t have to be lovable or even likable — that will depend on your genre and story choices — but they have to be captivating enough that we want to spend time with them by reading the story.
A great example is the TV show Succession, which is about a billionaire media mogul and his family. There are no likable characters, but it is utterly compelling to watch them self-destruct.
Characters that span series can deepen the reader’s relationship with them as you expand their back story and relationships into new plots. Readers will remember the character more than the plot or the book title and look forward to (and hopefully pre-order) the next in series because they want more time with your characters. British crime author Angela Marsons said in an interview that her readers experience returning to her characters as like “putting on a pair of old slippers.”
Character description and character tags
“Fiction is about the particular, not the generic and ‘ordinary.’”
—Roz Morris, Nail Your Novel: Writing Characters Who’ll Keep Readers Captivated
Some writers like to imagine which actors they’d cast in their character roles to bring them alive. I find pictures of actors and paste them into my Scrivener project. This helps with visuals but also with the sense of the character.
My ARKANE agent Morgan Sierra has always been Angelina Jolie in Lara Croft or Mr and Mrs Smith, and Blake Daniel in my Brooke and Daniel crime thriller series was based on Jesse Williams, best known as Dr Jackson Avery in Grey’s Anatomy.
You need specific details about the characters to make them seem real.
Consider using character tags, little details that anchor them in the reader’s mind. Robert Galbraith’s Cormoran Strike is an amputee, and his pain and the physical challenges of his prosthesis are a key part of every story.
My character Blake Daniel always wears gloves to cover the scars on his hands, which provides an angle into his wounded past as well as a visual cue for the reader.
A character tag might also be a specific kind of dialogue or action that contrasts with how others speak or behave and can be used by a group of characters. A Game of Thrones by George R.R. Martin features different family houses with various mottos and sigils. The Starks say “Winter is coming,” and their sigil is a dire wolf.
Character flaws and wounds
Everyone has issues.
It’s true in real life, and it’s even more true in fiction. Your characters cannot be happy and perfect in every way — unless that is a feature of the story itself.
Character flaws are aspects of personality that affect the person so much that it is a challenge to face and overcome them. These character flaws can become central to the plot. In Jaws by Peter Benchley, the protagonist Brody is afraid of the water, but he has to overcome that flaw to destroy the killer shark and save the town.
You can imagine a flaw for almost any aspect of a character. Choose a flaw that will create the effects you need for your character and plot. Some flaws are about personality. A character who values status above all else might choose to marry for money, but perhaps they can only find true love when they overcome that flaw.
Some flaws are more life-threatening. For example, a character with an addiction to painkillers might lie to cover up spending patterns and spiral into debt in order to fund their need.
Remember, your characters should feel like real people, so never define them purely by their flaws. The character addicted to painkillers might also be a brilliant and successful female lawyer who gets up at four o’clock in the morning to work out at the gym, likes ’80s music, and volunteers at the local dog shelter at the weekends. There are plenty of functional addicts who don’t fit the stereotype too often seen in the media. Part of your job as a writer is to break out of cliché and write original, compelling characters.
Character wounds are formed from life experience and are part of your character’s backstory. These are often traumatic events that happened before the events of your novel, but they shape the character’s reactions in the present story.
In my ARKANE thrillers, Morgan Sierra’s husband Elian died in her arms during a military operation. This happened before the series begins, but her memories of it recur when she faces a firefight, and she struggles to find happiness again for fear of losing someone she loves once more.
Trauma affects people differently, so don’t assume certain reactions. For example, the COVID-19 pandemic has been traumatic for so many, but its impact on behavior varies. For some, hand-washing and virus-avoidance practices have turned into Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD). Others don’t want to leave the safety of their home ever again. Some have scarred lungs, others have scarred memories. Still others can’t wait to get back out in the world and seek adventure once more.
Question your initial assumptions about what a wound might be and how it affects your character. For more ideas, check out The Emotional Wound Thesaurus: A Writer’s Guide to Psychological Trauma by Becca Puglisi and Angela Ackerman.
Character emotion
“We’re wired to crave, hunt for, and latch on to what the protagonist feels so that we can experience his struggles as if they were our own.”
—Lisa Cron, Story Genius
One reason we read is to get inside the heads of other people. We want to know how they feel as they go through the events of the story. We want to be moved. We want to close the book with a sigh of satisfaction.
You can achieve this with your story if you write your characters with enough depth to evoke emotion in the reader. Take them into the mind and experience of the character by using sensory details about the setting and the character’s emotional reaction to what happens.
Someone with a phobia of snakes might have a physical reaction to seeing one — sweating palms, raised heart rate, narrowed vision, churning stomach. They might feel a need to run away or curl up like a child and weep, or they might take drugs to numb themselves if they have no choice but to face their fear. They might remember the events that caused the phobia in the first place, regret how it impacts their life now, or swear to get therapy so they are not so out of control next time.
Check out The Emotion Thesaurus: A Writer’s Guide to Character Expression by Becca Puglisi and Angela Ackerman for help writing emotion.
Show, don’t tell
“When a writer tells, they have made the judgement for the reader. When a writer shows, they offer the evidence and let the reader decide that the character is fun, talented, beautiful, mean, cruel, generous, or troubled. The reader owns the judgment and remembers it because they made it themselves. Which is exactly how we form conclusions about flesh-and-blood people.”
—Roz Morris, Nail Your Novel: Writing Characters Who’ll Keep Readers Captivated
Most writers have heard the saying ‘show, don’t tell’ so many times that it’s easy to nod and say, ‘yes, I must do that,’ and then promptly write scenes that tell rather than show.
It’s simple to say, but it takes practice. It’s harder than it sounds.
Basically, you need to reveal your character through action and dialogue, rather than explanation.
In my thriller Day of the Vikings, ARKANE agent Morgan Sierra fights a Neo-Viking in the halls of the British Museum and brings down a man bigger than she is with her Krav Maga martial art ability, which she learned and honed in the Israeli military.
Telling would be something like, “Morgan was an expert in Krav Maga and she easily brought down the Neo-Viking.”
Showing is a longer, more active fight scene that demonstrates Morgan’s capabilities and the edge of her anger, which she barely keeps in control. In the previous scene, she had introduced herself as an academic, and now the reader sees she is definitely more than that. The fight scene is not just about showing action. It also opens up questions about her back story, demonstrates aspects of character, and moves the plot forward.
Telling has its place, of course, but make sure you are using it only when you need it — for example, when summarizing a past event. You can correct too much telling in your edits if the balance is off in the first draft.
Character names
Your main character names are important, especially if you are creating a series character who lives on across multiple books.
Some character names will come to you and seem ‘right’ in some way. At least this happens to me in the discovery writing process. The names Morgan Sierra and Jamie Brooke, both strong female protagonists and the leads of two of my series, came to me clearly as I thought about the stories I wanted to tell.
For secondary characters, once I know their nationality and age, I google actors and use a combination of names. For Asha Kapoor, the Indian antagonist in Destroyer of Worlds, I googled ‘young Indian Hindu actress’ and then chose from a combination of names that came up. Hindu names are different from Muslim or Christian names, so if religion is important, make sure you account for that.
You can also use baby name sites to look up meanings and ancestral links to underscore aspects of character. In Map of Shadows, I picked Sienna’s surname, Farren, because it means adventurous.
A name can also have deeper resonance. One example is a secondary character, Corium Jones, in my crime thriller, Deviance. The word corium is Latin for dermis, a skin layer, and also the thickened, leathery part of an insect forewing. The character Corium preserves human skin covered in tattoos, so his name is an important aspect of the character and underscores the theme of the novel.
Make sure you google the name of the character to check if there is a public figure with similarities to your fictional character. Your character name doesn’t have to be original, but you don’t want to mistakenly use someone real in a recognizable way. For One Day in Budapest, I created a Hungarian right-wing politician using my actor technique and then discovered that there was, in fact, a politician by that name in Hungary. I changed my character’s name!
Once you’ve chosen a name, read it out loud so you know how it will sound in the reader’s head and also in the audio version of your book. You will default to certain names, so at some point in the process, make a list of all your characters in alphabetical order to ensure you have variety in the letters they start with and in the sound of their names.
Names are also important as they signal to the reader that this character is worth paying attention to. Don’t name a character if they are just a ‘walk on’ — for example, a waiter who brings a drink to your character in a bar. You don’t need to name the waiter unless they play a more significant role.
Character archetypes
You should aim to create original characters, but you can use archetypes as a way to underscore their role and purpose in the story. Examples of archetypes include the Mentor, the Ally, and the Magician.
These roles appear in ancient stories and myths and have been expanded into psychological archetypes by the psychologist Carl Jung, and further by Joseph Campbell in The Hero with a Thousand Faces.
You can easily spot archetypes in books and movies. I love the character of Q in the James Bond movies. He represents a Geek or Nerd archetype, solving technological questions, introducing cool gadgets, and helping Bond with the more intellectual side of cases. I created Martin Klein, my geeky ARKANE archivist, in that archetypal role and, over the series, he has developed into so much more. Through him, I explore my fascination with artificial intelligence, and how technology overlaps with aspects of religion. I even have ideas for stand-alone stories with Martin as I identify with him so much.
What do your characters want?
What does your protagonist want? Why do they want it? Is there an external reason and/or an internal reason for wanting it?
This desire may be on multiple levels. For example, Phil joins the military at a time of war. She wants to serve her country. She also wants to get out of her dead-end town and do something with her life. This way, she can earn a living and learn new skills, and maybe even travel. The risk is worth it.
But maybe her motivation goes deeper.
Phil’s father and grandfather served in the military and, by joining up, she will finally earn their respect and maybe even love after years of being ignored as the only girl in the family. Perhaps she has never found real friends in her small town, but in the military, she will be accepted into a community and find her place in the world. This could turn into a coming-of-age story, or maybe a romance.
Or perhaps Phil’s father died on a military mission under mysterious circumstances, and she wants to find out what happened from the inside. This could become a mystery or a thriller, because her true desire is to find out the truth and avenge her father.
Consider layers of motivation in your story. What a character really wants deep down will be more complex than just the surface desire.
Who or what is trying to stop your character getting what they want?
Your antagonist also wants something, often diametrically opposed to your protagonist. They also need a good reason for it, or at least a reason that makes sense to them.
In my ARKANE thriller Tree of Life, Aurelia dos Santos Fidalgo is the heiress of a Brazilian mining empire. She wants to restore the Earth to its original state to atone for the destruction caused by her father’s company, and she is part of a radical ecological group who believe that the only way to restore Nature is to end all human life. This is a believable motivation in an era of climate change, but clearly Morgan and Jake have to stop her.
Once you understand who or what the antagonist is and what they want, you will get ideas for the conflicts and challenges that will fuel the plot.
Back story
Apart from the very occasional exception, most fictional stories don’t start with the birth of a character and then share every detail of the character’s life over the course of the book. The story begins with an inciting incident, something that interrupts the character’s status quo. There will always be back story: the stuff that happened before this story started.
You don’t need to describe it all, and readers don’t need to know everything about the character in chapter one.
When we meet people for the first time, or the second, or the third, we might only glimpse their past and discover the occasional detail about them over time. Even when we have known someone for many years, we never know everything about their lives. In the same way, you do not need to share your character’s entire history at the beginning of your novel, or in fact, ever. Share whatever is needed to serve the story as it becomes necessary.
This also ties into ‘show, don’t tell.’ In my ARKANE thrillers, I don’t need to tell you about Morgan’s military history straight away. I can wait until there’s a fight scene, then demonstrate her competency, and then have her internal thoughts reflect on the past.
Character arc
How does your character change through the course of the story?
They will inevitably grow and change because of the events that happen and the decisions they make. You can reveal the progression of character through action, dialogue, and internal thought.
The arc is more easily demonstrated if you make the character’s position more obvious at the beginning because the shift happens over the course of the story, and it is clear where the character must end up.
In my dark fantasy thriller Risen Gods, co-written with J. Thorn, Ben Henare rejects his Maori heritage and its associated mythology. By the end of the book, he has to embrace it in order to defeat the risen gods who threaten Aotearoa New Zealand. Along the way, Ben must face supernatural creatures he previously didn’t believe to exist.
Different stories suit different character arcs, and if you’re writing a series, then the character can’t change dramatically every time. Lee Child’s Jack Reacher is a Lone Ranger type of character. In every novel, he arrives in a town alone, dispenses justice, defends the weak, kills the bad guys, and then leaves — alone once more. He is essentially unchanged by his experience, except for a few more bruises.
In contrast, literary fiction novels primarily focus on character arc with less emphasis on plot. You can choose how extreme your character arc becomes in your story.
Using people you know as the basis for character
Our life experiences and the people we meet along the way inevitably end up woven into our stories somehow, but beware of creating characters that are exactly like people you know. Use composites instead. Take aspects of real people and combine them with others to create unique characters.
My ARKANE series protagonist Morgan Sierra is definitely my alter ego, and her musings on religion and the supernatural are often my own. But her Krav Maga fighting skill and her ability to kill the bad guys are definitely her own!
Write diverse characters
The world is a diverse place, so your fiction needs to be populated with all kinds of people.
If I only populated my fiction with characters like me, they would be boring novels indeed!
There are many dimensions of difference. Race, nationality, sex, age, body type, ability, religion, gender, sexual orientation, socio-economic status, class, culture, education level, job, values, and so much more.
All these shape character worldview and, even then, don’t assume that similar types of people think the same, regardless of their shared experiences.
When the UK split over the Brexit vote, many were surprised by people who voted a certain way against expectations. Similarly, behavior and opinions during the pandemic often didn’t conform to type. Part of your job as a writer is to bring believable characters to life, and humans are truly diverse. Don’t box a character in. Consider different aspects of their lives rather than just what’s on the surface.
Some authors worry they will make mistakes when writing diverse characters. We live in a time of outrage, and many authors have been criticized for writing outside their own experience. A few have even been ‘cancelled’ for their opinions.
So, is it just too dangerous to write diverse characters?
Of course not.
The media amplifies outliers, and most authors include diverse characters in every book without causing offense because they work hard to get it right.
It’s about awareness, research, and intent.
To start, be aware of how diverse your characters are. Have you written a mono-cultural perspective for all of them? Is that an accurate representation of the world of your story? Either design the book to contain different people or go back through and diversify your cast in the editing phase.
Then research. Don’t write what you know. Write what you want to learn about.
I love research. It’s part of why I’m an author in the first place. I take any excuse to dive into a world different from my own!
I write international thrillers and dark fantasy, and my fiction is populated with characters from all over the world. I have a multi-cultural family and I have lived in many places and traveled widely, so I have met, worked with, and had relationships with people from different cultures. I find story ideas through travel and if I set my books in a certain place, then, of course, the story is populated with the people who live there.
Destroyer of Worlds is set mostly in India, a country I love and have traveled in several times. As part of my research, I read books about Hindu myth and watched documentaries about the sadhus, the holy men. One of my Indian readers from Mumbai also read the story to check my cultural references.
Risen Gods is a dark fantasy YA story set in New Zealand with a young Maori man, Ben, and a white Pakeha woman, Lucy. A tsunami separates the friends and they travel the length of the country, fighting mythical creatures as the volcanoes erupt and the Maori gods rise again. I am a New Zealand citizen and lived there for several years. My husband is a Kiwi and we still have family there. I studied books about Maori mythology and fiction written by Maori authors. One of my male Maori readers read the story to check for cultural issues, and a vulcanologist read for accuracy on eruptions.
The opening scene of ARKANE thriller End of Days is set in an Appalachian snake-handling church in the USA. I transcribed hours of video from such churches on YouTube to try and understand the worldview of the worshippers, as my antagonist, Lilith, was brought up in that tradition.
Research using books, films, and podcasts, and focus particularly on those produced by people from the worldview you want to learn about. You can often find readers in your community or hire sensitivity readers if you want to be certain you have done a decent job. (See chapter 5.4 for more detail.)
It’s also about intent.
Readers are smart, and they will perceive an author’s intent from the book. My sister-in-law is Nigerian, and we were sitting together once with some other people having a drink. One person said something that I thought she might be offended by. While the content was questionable, she noted that they did not intend to offend. It was easy to tell the difference. The comment came from a place of ignorance, not an intent to harm.
Do your research. Try your best. Ask for help to get it right. Apologize if you need to. But, please, write diverse characters.
Check out Writing the Other: A Practical Approach by Nisi Shawl and Cynthia Ward, and their website WritingTheOther.com for more help in getting this right.
Questions:
• Make a list of characters from books, movies or TV shows you love. What makes them memorable, interesting, or compelling?
• Who are the different characters in your story? If you know them already, then you can start to make notes about them. If you don’t know yet, don’t worry, you can create them along the way.
• Why will readers want to spend time with these characters?
• How can you use specific character description and tags to bring them alive? Add these details to your character notes if you have a list already.
• What flaws and wounds might your characters have that add depth and potential to your story? Have you made sure your characters are fully realized, and not purely defined by one thing?
• What are the primary emotions your protagonist will experience over the course of the novel? How can you deepen those emotions and show them on the page?
• What does ‘show, don’t tell’ mean in practice for your novel? For your story, which aspects are most important to show?
• What resources will you use to choose character names?
• How could you use character archetypes to enrich your characters?
• What does your protagonist want? Why do they want it? Can you go deeper into their motivations?
• Who or what is trying to stop your character from getting what they want? What is the antagonist’s believable motivation?
• What part does back story play in your story? How much do readers need to know, and how can you weave it into the novel rather than delivering it as an info dump?
• Does your character have an arc in the novel? How do they grow and change?
• How will you integrate aspects of people you know into characters?
• Does your novel include diverse characters? If not, how can you revise your cast of characters to make it more diverse? What resources will you draw on to make sure your representations are accurate and believable?
Resources:
• Creating Character Arcs: The Masterful Author’s Guide to Uniting Story Structure, Plot, and Character Development — K.M. Weiland
• Nail Your Novel: Writing Characters Who’ll Keep Readers Captivated — Roz Morris
• The Emotion Thesaurus: A Writer’s Guide to Character Expression — Angela Ackerman and Becca Puglisi
• The Emotional Wound Thesaurus: A Writer’s Guide to Psychological Trauma — Becca Puglisi and Angela Ackerman
• The Hero with a Thousand Faces — Joseph Campbell
• The Heroine with 1001 Faces — Maria Tatar
• The Novel Writer’s Toolkit: From Idea to Bestseller — Bob Mayer
• The Science of Storytelling: Why Stories Make Us Human and How To Tell Them Better — Will Storr
• Wired for Story: The Writer’s Guide to Using Brain Science to Hook Readers from the Very First Sentence — Lisa Cron
• Writing the Other: A Practical Approach — Nisi Shawl and Cynthia Ward
• Website with resources and classes on writing diverse characters: www.WritingTheOther.com
• Interview with Angela Marsons on writing a successful crime thriller series on The Creative Penn Podcast, May 2022 — www.TheCreativePenn.com/angelamarsons
