Character Introduction

Characters are the heart of any story. It doesn’t matter if you’re writing a short story, novel, or screenplay; your characters play the most important role. They are what will draw your readers into the story and hold onto them until the end. Your job as the writer is to make your characters so real that your readers feel like they are walking in the character’s shoes themselves when they are reading your story.

I believe that it is almost impossible to come up with a completely new story that no one has written before. This can make it difficult for writers to come up with something new, but it is possible to make your stories stand out. Instead of looking at the plot of your story being different, make your characters are different. Making your characters unique will be what sets your stories apart from others.

Things to Consider When Creating Your Cast of Characters:

Do You Like Your Characters Enough?

You are going to spend days, weeks, months, or possibly years with these characters. You are responsible for creating and telling their stories for as many as 400 pages, so if you don’t like them, your story will lose its effectiveness, and your readers may lose interest.

How Are Your Characters Going to Fit Together?

How your characters interact with each other can be crucial to your story. The most obvious example of this is the antagonist and protagonist. The less obvious relationships you need to consider are between the characters on the same side. The interactions between the characters on the same side are more complex because both characters are supposed to be good, but your characters must still have flaws that can and will sometimes get on the nerves of your other characters. This will create conflict between the characters and add to the plot of your story.

Make Sure You Choose the Right Main Character. 

It may seem like the easiest thing to do when you first begin writing your story, but often it’s not so simple. Practically speaking, it’s not always simply picking one of your characters and writing about them.

When I started my first book, I had a couple as the main characters, but as I wrote my first draft, I realized that I was developing a side character far more than I was the main characters I had originally imagined.

When I began to rewrite my book, I switched the characters around and made that side character the main protagonist of the series.

Sometimes you as a writer will have to experiment with who fits the role of the main character best.

How Big Should Your Cast of Characters Be?

Learn from my mistake. If you are a brand-new writer, start off with a small cast of characters. I’d say six at most. That way, you will have your main character, your villain, a couple of side characters that will help your character through their journey, and then finally, the mentor or wise older person that sends your hero on their journey.

A smaller cast of characters makes it easier to move around the story for a writer who is just starting out. This doesn’t mean that you can’t have a larger cast of characters, but it can cause unnecessary headaches down the road when your large cast of 10+ characters start acting like toddlers (Which they do a lot of the time), and they are all clamoring for your attention. When I began my first book, I started with two main protagonists along with six other main/side characters. Once I learned that it would have been easier to have a smaller cast of characters, it was too late because I was already too deep with them.

If you made the same mistake as I did, I will have a future blog post on how you can orchestrate a large cast of characters throughout your story. 

Your Protagonist Won’t always be right, and your antagonist won’t always be wrong. 

Your characters are humans, so that they will make both good choices and bad choices. Your protagonist might make a mistake that hurts people. Your antagonist might be trying to do something for the greater good but is going about it the wrong way.

A great example of this is in Black Panther. The relationship between T’Challa and Erik Killmonger. The hero learns a profound truth about his enemy that counters his belief about decisions his country and father made years earlier that was wrong.

Develop your supporting characters the same way you would develop a protagonist or antagonist. 

Supporting characters are there to support or act against your protagonist and antagonist. How they’ve experienced things in their past will predict how they interact with the main characters.

Avoid Intimidation and Break Down the Process

The best way to create your characters is by creating a step-by-step process. I remember when I began writing my first book and shared pieces of it with my mom. She would be brutally honest with me and say that I had a great skeleton, but I still had to add the veins, muscles, organs, skin, and so on. You get the picture.

When you look at your characters, you need to look at them like you’re sculpting an actual person, piece by piece.

In the next couple of blogs, I will go deeper into my process of outlining my characters. 

I usually develop my characters in three parts.

General Descriptors

What does the character look like? Are they male or female? What race are they? Etc.

Nature

Personality? Powers? Protagonist? Antagonist? Etc.

Community

Where do they live? Who do they interact with?

Get your paper ready because starting next week, and I will be breaking down the character outlining process and help you come up with a battle plan to start that story you’ve wanted to write.

Coming Up Next… The Looks and Overview of Your Characters.

©All writing property of R. M. McDermott LLC