Character Development — Realistic & Human
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Character development tips for creative writing –
create new interesting,
original and memorable characters…
or give established characters a breath of fresh air.
A Reason for Everything
Real life people think, feel and act the way they do for a reason. Events in our past, environmental factors, social factors, upbringing… all of these cause lasting emotions and color our view of the world. The same goes for characters.
Even if you are writing a fantasy story and your character can do astounding and wonderful things normal people could not do, when you take all that away, your character is still a person. Characters who are personified non-human creatures are just that – personified, making what is non-human human enough for readers to identify with.
If you want a character to be convincing to your reader, your character’s design must have some basis in reality. And realism starts with understanding that nothing simply “just is”… but there is a reason for everything.
Is your character just a big grouch? That’s fine but… why? It’s not good enough to say: “Well… he’s just angsty. That’s the way he is.” If you can’t support the character’s foundational personality with real and believable reasons, then your character loses a sense of depth. And you, as an Author, miss out on the opportunity to really get to understand what’s going on in that character’s head.
This doesn’t mean you have to explain everything about your character to your readers – there are certainly some things you will want to keep secret. And you don’t have to know everything there is to know about your character – that usually comes with time. As long as readers get the feeling that you have overall knowledge and authority of the character in your writing, your characters will come through as convincing and real.
You Can’t Be Everything to Everyone
We’ve probably said the term “I’m only human”… at some time on our life, generally when we’ve just made some sort of mistake. Another facet of creating a realistic character that your readers can connect to is knowing what makes a character human in the eyes of others.
Faults, mistakes, bad judgment calls… we’ve all had our down days… weeks… months? There’s not a single person that can claim to be perfect among us. And it’s generally when others stumble, struggle, even fall… but pick themselves back up again, that we come to care, sympathize, cheer on and laud someone else.
The same can be said of your characters. To truly become real, no matter good or evil – they must have faults, fears and moments of weakness. A character that never makes a mistake, never loses a fight, always knows the right thing to say, is loved by everyone, is always sure of what direction to go in, knows them self perfectly inside and out… is not just plastic-Barbie-fake… but downright boring and annoying. When someone is always a winner, what are the stakes in their struggle in life? Is there even a real struggle to be had?
Readers are not perfect, therefore, cannot connect to a character that shows no human flaws. In fact, readers may reject a flawless character as unrealistic and unbelievable. The character you strove to show as perfect in the readers’ eyes suddenly becomes the one that is least liked.
A rule of thumb is to always balance the good with the bad. For every how many strengths a character may have, they need to have something they aren’t so good at. You will find that as your characters struggle to overcome their weaknesses, that is when your readers will respond and connect to your characters the most.
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5 Comments on Character Development — Realistic & Human
I agree definitely with what you say here–perfect is boring. It’s the same reason many fanfic readers hate Mary-Sues. Not just cause the added character typically represents the writer’s inner fantasy that we don’t really care to partake in, but also because the character is typically flawless and beautiful in every conceivable way.
Add faults to your heroes, and add favorable qualities to your villains. I think it’s easy to forget that our villains need to be humanized too. We think that if we dehumanize them they become somehow more villainous in the eyes of readers. I disagree with that notion–I think the best villains are ones we can’t completely hate because we can understand their motivations and methods. Then, as readers, we have to ask ourselves “If we were in his/her position, would we have done the same thing?”
I thought about bringing up the dreaded Mary-Sue in this article… but I just never got to it during writing. But yeah, that’s more or less the definition of Mary-Sue that I get, too.
Very good point about adding good qualities to villains, Pen! There’s no one that is all good or all bad… and a villain who is pure evil and nothing besides is pretty flat as a character. Most of my antagonists are fallen anti-heroes… I try to give all of them some characteristic that make people realize that “bad” might just be someone with a view of the world that doesn’t match the so-called “good”.
The exception of this is Zerom… I try to make him as inhuman as possible. Part of that is due to writing in a fan setting where his future form has already been set in stone. But part of it is actually a flip-side reflection of Zemi and the Trine… a way of saying — “Look what they might have become. Look what they chose to do instead.”
People often ask me if I ever make a bad guy that eventually doesn’t turn good. I always have Zerom to fall back on! XD
Yay! I’m agreed with! *likes* Funny you should mention Zerom as inhuman. Definitely morally he’s inhuman, but emotionally I found him very human. Twisted, yes, but most twisted individuals were at one point very sensitive individuals. Possibly too sensitive to deal with circumstances (either a series of them or just one individual case) and thus became emotionally twisted to cope with reality. That was my reaction to Zerom when he and Zemi had their first real conversation in Dreigiau. He seemed like a little brother that’d go to any lengths to be recognized by the one he admired most–sibling rivalry on a grand scale. I don’t know where he stands now in all that but back then that’s how he seemed to me.
Never really thought about Zerom in that light. But I guess in the beginning, that’s fairly true. As he develops, however, I think that he gets further and further away from being human/Earthian as Chaos began to take a hold over him. Eventually he’s just consumed and driven by the force with nothing else left in him but destructive tendancies and hunger.
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