Tag: How to write characters for a novel

Writing Tips for Creative Fun with Characters

Writing exercised with characters

This post from January on how on writing tips for creative fun with characters was one of my most popular article this year. Enjoy!

I’m a character writer. I start with developing characters and getting to know them. Once I understand them as well as my kids, it’s time to throw them into a story. When my writing isn’t going well, I look to my characters to rescue the narrative. And to put the fun back into a story.

Fun Ideas for Characters 

Here are some ideas to write about characters for just the fun of it.

  • Create two very obnoxious characters. Then put them in a scene together.
  • Write from your pet’s POV, especially what it thinks of you.
  • Insert yourself in a scene with one of your favorite fiction characters like Sherlock Holmes or Bilbo Baggins.
  • Insert yourself in a scene with one of the characters you’ve created.
  • Reverse a famous hero-villain pair. For example, Superman terrorizes the world, and only Lex Luthor can save it.

Fun Ideas for Characters in Your WIP

If you’re writing on a deadline, you might not have time to write something outside of your WIP. So below are ideas to consider adding to your WIP, if you’ve found all the fun has gone out of your current project but you can’t step away from it.

  • Add a scene or two with your favorite supporting character.
  • Have two characters who don’t like each other meet.
  • Have your main character (MC) fight wither their closest friend.
  • Have your MC do something that’s outrageous for them.
  • Have your antagonist do something outrageous for them.
  • Bring together two characters who haven’t had a scene together yet.
  • Add a character who isn’t supposed to be in the story. For example, you decided you didn’t need your MC’s grandma in the story and sent her on vacation. Bring her back and see if she can fit in the story.
  • Write a scene that isn’t working from the POV of a different character.

What suggestions do have for writing fun with characters? For more character prompts, click here.

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Have Fun With Minor Characters

Writing tips for creating characters

Creating characters for fiction can seem impossible. Mountains of books and posts have been published giving acres of advice, some of it contradictory. Main and major characters should be realistic and relatable. Likable. No, not likable. Intriguing. Flawed but heroic. Peanut butter but jelly. After working so hard to make our characters ones readers want to spend time with, it’s a relief to have fun with minor characters. I don’t have to worry about how they are growing and changing through the plot. Minor characters serve a limited purpose, so I can tinker with them as much as I want as long as they accomplish what I need them to in a particular scene.

Feel Like Stretching Your Writing?

If you feel like your major characters, great as they are, have confined you to a certain type of personality, experiment with minor characters who are very different from your major ones. My main character, amateur sleuth Rae Riley, is reserve and/or shy with a sense of humor based on observations. So I might make a minor character more outgoing or outrageous to widen the variety of characters in my story.

Let’s say Rae needs to talk to a woman working at the post office. I could write the woman as extremely chatty, going off on tangents left and right, making it hard for Rae to find out what she wants to know.

Even better, I could have two minor characters play off each other. The chatty postal worker could work with a woman as gloomy as Eeyore the donkey from the Winnie-the-Pooh stories. The contrast would be a ton of fun to work with.

Choose Minor Characters from the Setting

Think about the setting your scene is taking place in. What kind of people do you normally find in that setting? Let’s say your main character is a mom who is waiting in the principal’s office to have a meeting with her. Who would you find in the principal’s office of an elementary school? One or more secretaries, teachers coming in and out, students coming in and out. Possibly other non-teaching staff, like the school nurse or speech therapist. Any of those could be used to freshen this scene.

You could also toss in unlikely people you’d find in the office. Like a single uncle who got stuck delivering his nieces and nephews to school that day. Or a toddler who escapes from Mom while she waits for her second-grader to come to the office for an appointment.

Here are more tips on writing characters.

What story had memorable minor characters?

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How to Write Sneaky Characters

How to write sneaky characters

My advice on characters today concerns how to write sneaky characters. I had to create one in my second novel, A Storm of Doubts, and he proved to be a challenge.

What Do I Mean by Sneaky Characters?

Since I write mysteries, of course the guilty party is always sneaky because he or she has to cover their tracks after committing the crime. But for this post, I’m referring to characters who are sneaky by nature. The weaselly police informant who will tell the cops anything for a price, making his information suspect. The high school girl who is so sweet to everyone’s face and yet anyone who associates with her is always caught up in some kind of drama.

These are characters whose actions, words, and expressions mask their real thoughts and feelings. A writer can approach this character one of two ways–either, the main character (MC) is completely taken in by the performance and the revelation of sneaky character’s true intentions is a big plot twist. Or the MC is suspicious of the sneaky character to begin with or soon after meeting him but has trouble deciding if the character is a sneak or trustworthy.

By the way, if you want your MC to be the sneaky character, you are allowed. Just remember–most readers enjoy a book because the MC is someone they want to spend time with. A sneaky MC could get very old, very fast.

Creating a Sneaky Character

In A Storm of Doubts, I adopted the second way of developing a sneaky character. Rae’s Uncle Troy returns to Marlin County, Ohio, where he grew up. Everyone there knows he’s a grifter, so Rae, my MC, is suspicious of him from the start.

I’ve read a lot about grifters and realized Troy would never be aggressive or combative in any situation. Grifters don’t want to bully you into doing what they want. They want to entice and manipulate you. This is harder to write than a blunt bully. A bully’s intentions are obvious and therefore easy to convey to the reader. Showing Troy entice and manipulate Rae was much harder because I had to write him in subtle lines.

What helped me was to realize Troy would agree to anything anyone said if it gave him an advantage. Unlike a lot of characters, who would take offense at being criticized, Troy goes along with the criticism because agreeing with someone puts him in a position to get closer to them. He’s like a snake who can pivot and twist in any direction he thinks necessary.

In this scene, Rae’s dad, the sheriff, is questioning Troy.

“You need to come up with better excuses.” Dad put away his notepad. “You made a mistake two years ago, and I got jumped. You made a mistake today and put my daughter in danger. You can’t keep saying you make mistakes, Troy. You’re forty-three. Not fourteen.” 

Tory sighed, his tiny mouth drooping. “I’m just not as smart as you are. “

I also use several two-person scene between Rae and Troy so I have the time to describe in more details his expressions and mannerisms and how Rae analyzes them to figure out what her uncle’s true intentions are.

Have you tried to write a sneaky character? What helped you to write them? Who is a convincing sneaky characters in a book or show?

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Writing Fun with Characters

Writing fun with characters

Since this month is all about having fun with writing, I’m giving you ideas on how to have writing fun with characters. I’m a character writer. I start with developing characters and getting to know them. Once I understand them as well as my kids, it’s time to throw them into a story. When my writing isn’t going well, I look to my characters to rescue the narrative. And to put the fun back into a story.

Fun Ideas for Characters

Here are some ideas to write about characters for just the fun of it.

  • Create two very obnoxious characters. Then put them in a scene together.
  • Write from your pet’s POV, especially what it thinks of you.
  • Insert yourself in a scene with one of your favorite fiction characters like Sherlock Holmes or Bilbo Baggins.
  • Insert yourself in a scene with one of the characters you’ve created.
  • Reverse a famous hero-villain pair. For example, Superman terrorizes the world, and only Lex Luthor can save it.

Fun Ideas for Characters in Your WIP

If you’re writing on a deadline, you might not have time to write something outside of your WIP. So below are ideas to consider adding to your WIP, if you’ve found all the fun has gone out of your current project but you can’t step away from it.

  • Add a scene or two with your favorite supporting character.
  • Have two characters who don’t like each other meet.
  • Have your main character (MC) fight wither their closest friend.
  • Have your MC do something that’s outrageous for them.
  • Have your antagonist do something outrageous for them.
  • Bring together two characters who haven’t had a scene together yet.
  • Add a character who isn’t supposed to be in the story. For example, you decided you didn’t need your MC’s grandma in the story and sent her on vacation. Bring her back and see if she can fit in the story.
  • Write a scene that isn’t working from the POV of a different character.

What suggestions do have for writing fun with characters? For more character prompts, click here.

2

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