We’ve all heard that dreaded term “character development,” but how do you actually go about achieving that? Well first, you need to intimately understand your characters. In building your character arcs, you’ll need to be able to answer the three most important questions:
What do they want? How far will they go to get it? How will you take it away from them?
As well as these quetions:
Where do they start? Where will they end up? What do they learn about themselves? What other characters are integral to their success? How about their failures? And how does this progress the story forward?
But which do you write first, the plot or the character outlines? Up to you. In Dance With Me, I had a story in my head that I needed to get down, so I wrote my first draft and then went back and defined and filled in my characters.
My characters were all representations of people I wish I had relationships with (romantic or platonic) or were the black holes left behind by trauma from my childhood. In Dance With Me, Charlie’s best friend, Scott, was based on the first guy I had a crush on in eighth grade. Through Scott I got to create the fantasy of being this guy’s friend and I got to channel my grief at never getting to be with him. Charlie’s little brother, Danny, was based on the manifestation of my growing up feeling like I had to take care of everyone around me. Building from real life gave me a focus. I knew roughly what this person looks like, how they talk, what they dress like, what they like eating, and what their background is. I also got a feeling of what that person meant to me, which I could use to enhance the relationships within the story and provide something more visceral for the reader.
*A word of caution* You will need to be careful and continually remind yourself that drawing inspiration from real people is only meant to provide you with an outline for your characters; they’re not supposed to be the characters. Take a lesson out of my book and don’t stunt your plot by forcing your characters to act like real people.
If you’d rather start with character outlines, then start by separating your characters into major and minor. In Dance With Me, my characterizations would look like this:
Major: The Protagonist, Charlie; her mom; her brother; her dad; and her love interest
Minor: Charlie’s friends
For each character, decide whether the character is dynamic or flat.
A dynamic character will need to go through a change by the end whereas a flat character remains the same the entire novel. Flat characters aren’t a bad thing. You can’t have your reader focus on all your characters equally, so some will need to fall to the background to let others shine. In the example above, two of Charlie’s friends are dynamic and two are flat, but all four aid Charlie in better understanding herself. It’s just that the dynamic characters change with her. (If you’d like to argue that some authors *cough Stephen King cough* make all their characters dynamic and that’s why they are so successful, then let’s chat!)
For each of your dynamic characters, make sure you can answer all of the questions from above. While it may be helpful to know the answers to these questions for your flat characters, this isn’t content that will come to life in the pages of your story.
Now it’s time to get writing and start building. Trust your characters; they won’t steer you wrong.
Elegance Press 