Building Believable Characters

A Flipside Workshop
Part Two:
Creating Depth

Hosted by [Po]



If you’ve made it to this wiki with a complete Characterization List and are prepared to brave the rest of this exercise, CONGRATULATIONS!

Before continuing, please read my short essays on finding your Character Base and the importance of Backstory. It is pretty basic material, but it may be useful for those less experienced writers in our midst, or those who have a harder time with these subjects.

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Our Deeper Personality List is quite a bit shorter than the Characterization List, and for good reason. You have already done the majority of the work involved in creating a person who is believable. Most likely you will never have occasion to put anywhere near that much about a character in your stories. But that is beside the point.

The point of learning your character’s Deeper Personality is this: out of respect to both the character you are creating and the reader meeting them for the first time, you must know everything there is to know about your character. This exercise is to help you fill in the gaps that were left after you completed the past list. The Portrait you develop from combining the information on both lists should give you a crystalline understanding of the person you are writing about.

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Rules of this exercise:

1. Give yourself as much (or as little) room to respond to the items as possible. Some are simple one-word replies, others require a bit of scribbling and delving within.
2. Use yourself as a template. Your own fears and aspirations are the most authentic resources you have. While I don’t expect you to have all the items filled with information about yourself, using something you are intimate with will flesh out your character better.
3. Please create a writing or a wiki page (preferred) for your Deeper Personality List, and link to it from the roster at the bottom of the page. Do not add it to this wiki.
4. Enjoy yourself and don’t give up! This is indeed work, but it should be pleasant work!


Enough stalling. Let’s get to listing!

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The Deeper Personality List:
*You may wish to copy/paste this into Word or Notepad to make answering simpler.


1. A childhood accident which has left them with a fear.
2. Their pet peeve.
3. Something they do really well.
4. Something they do really badly.
5. Something in their past they wish they hadn't done - and why.
6. A recurring nightmare.
7. A fantasy
8. The one thing they would change about themselves, if they could.
9. The worst and best moment of their life so far.
10. How would they react if a stranger offered them a lift?
11. How would they react if they saw a child, crying and alone?
12. How would they react if they found a purse full of large denomination notes?
13. Think about introducing your character to someone you know at a party – what single sentence would you use to tell someone about them?
14. Write down everything you can think of about your character that has not been mentioned in either list.

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Ok, you’ve done all this homework, and you’re thinking “Now what?”

Most of this information you will never tell your reader – you will only uncover the parts of the character that are vital to the progress of the story. However, knowing it is essential for you, because it allows you to paint a consistent and believable picture of how your character would react when they encounter the situations they will deal with in your plot. It may seem like overkill, but you will find that once you have carried out the exercise two or three times it will become second nature to you to ask these kind of questions about everyone you write.
Once you have all the information, you will manipulate it to conjure the reaction to the character you want from your reader.

For instance, take one of your character's features:

If you want your reader to like them, you might say they have "an geniculate, aristocratic nose". If you want to make them a villain perhaps you'll describe it as "long, sharp and officious". If you want to present them in a neutral light "her nose was long and pointed".
You will unfold your character gradually through what they say, what they do, and how they respond to each of the events that happen they travel through the journey you have created from them.

Show your character's reactions, feelings and emotions to your reader, don't tell them - it's much more effective to say "Louisa gently brushed the hair that had fallen forward off of Matthew’s forehead" than "Louisa was overcome with tenderness", or to have your character say "I could sleep for a week" rather than "Tyler was completely exhausted". As your reader sees your character's behaviors and hears their voice, they will grow to understand them.

Keep in mind what you know about your character as you write, and keep checking back – would someone from this background really act like this in this situation? As long as your answer is "yes", you have a character who will hold your reader's interest; if the answer is "no" you are heading into regions where you will lose them, and if it is "I don't know", go back and find out.

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Participants

Please place your name here if you intend to join this Flipside Workshop exercise. 

1. [chuchutrain]
2. [Nell]
3. [Veltzeh]

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Roster

Please place your name and a link to your Deeper Personality List here, once you have completed this Flipside Workshop exercise.

1. [chuchutrain]: 63.Excercises.Building Believable Characters: part 2
2. [Nell]: 226.NWW.Perceptions
3.

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Back to Flipside!