Character Toolkit

A selection of approaches to building well-rounded fictional characters.

Note - this week we have another example of the kind of content I’ll be writing for paid subscribers only in future - an overview of character creation and development in long fiction. But August is free for everyone so dig in x

Characterisation is the absolute backbone of fiction of all types, and most especially literary fiction. Think of the characters you’ve loved as a reader. I think most of our favourite characters are not the ones who are perfect, or best at everything. They’re not even the ones who are necessarily written with the best prose, or that say the wittiest, cleverest things. They are simply the ones who feel alive. 

So how do we bring them to life?

Well… lots of ways! As ever with writing, we need a whole box full of tools - one isn’t really enough. Here’s a selection to pick and choose from. I normally use all of these at some point in the novel, but perhaps different ones at different stages of drafting. 

Basic Questions

Character creation at its most basic can be pretty much the same as inventing a role playing character, or playing an imaginary game with a 7 year old. You need to know some straightforward facts about your character - the kind of things I might learn about a person sitting next to me on a longish train journey. Name, living situation, family, occupation, pets, favourite food, that kind of thing. Who is this person, on the surface? This is an example from my upcoming book, Things We Lose In Waves (order it here, please and thank you).

Name: Alex Bainton

Job: Works at Co-op/part time bar maid

Family: Lives with boyfriend, Si. Her mother, who she has a difficult relationship with, lives close by at the top of the cliff.

Pets: A small dog left to her by her beloved Auntie Jean

Interests: Nature and geography

The Proust Questionnaire

Next up, we go deeper. Who is this person deep down? What are their hopes and fears and dreams? We’re now getting into the realm of questions you’d only find out over the course of a long friendship or a fifth date. There’s a questionnaire, popularised by Proust, which can be very satisfyingly used to ask these kinds of questions of your characters. I suggest going through and trying to answer all of them on your character, even (especially?) the ones that don’t come readily to mind, or that make you feel uncomfortable. Remember, all of this is development work. It doesn’t need to go into the finished manuscript. As writers we know more about our characters than our readers will ever need. Here’s a sample of answers from Alex - 

What is your greatest extravagance? Smoking

When and where were you happiest? The summer of 2004

If you could change one thing about yourself, what would it be? I’d learn to control my temper better

Horoscopes, Enneagram and Myers-Briggs

If it’s the kind of thing that appeals to you, it can also be useful to fit your characters into popular personality systems - whether that’s Myers Briggs or horoscopes or one I haven’t heard of. This is a particularly good time to be guided by your own interests. Are you into horoscopes? Do your characters’ birth charts. Fill out a personality quiz online on their behalf if that’s the kind of thing you do on your lunch hour to relax. Take from it whatever you need. I find using these kinds of systems can be really helpful when I move on to thinking about how the characters might interact with each other (and for making sure that they’re sufficiently differentiated). If I know that my main character is an introvert, I also know that it’s possibly a good idea to put an extrovert into their life. But this can get so detailed, so complex. How would an Aires and a Pisces react if they were forced to solve a murder together? I genuinely don’t know, but if you do, then it’s a helpful question to ask.

Enneagram is my chosen personality system. Like me, Alex is enneagram number three - the performer, who always wants to be seen to be doing well. I don’t know a lot about horoscopes but she’s definitely a fire sign. I think that her best friend and boyfriend are water, though. Her mother’s another fire. So I can already get a rough idea of who might be driving action, and the various ways the other characters might respond to each other.

What Do Your Characters Want?

My first degree was in English and Theatre Studies and I still think that Stanislavski (a theatre practitioner) is one of the ultimate resources in character creation. Let me tell you some other time about my opinions on the similarities between acting and writing but suffice to say, I got serious about writing novels because I was simply too tired to do a full run at the Edinburgh Festival again. Stanislavski states that a character in a scene has both an objective (a short term goal that drives their action on the surface, eg I want an apple) and a superobjective, which is a long term (possibly subconscious) goal that drives all their action in every scene (eg I want to be loved). If we consider our characters in these terms, we always have an idea of what they might do, how they might create change, in a convincing way. My character went into the shop to buy an apple and while she was there she comforted her ex boyfriend even though she swore to herself she wouldn’t talk to him again. Why? She wanted to be loved. But she went into the shop in the first place because she wanted an apple. For our characters to be truly convincing they must want big and small things at the same time. It is perfectly possible to want both climate justice and a bag of malteasers simultaneously - I almost always want both these things. 

This is another point where we can reflect on the dynamics between characters. What if two of the character’s wants are mutually exclusive? Does that make one of them the antagonist? Maybe.

Alex’s want is quite simple at the chronological point we meet her - her objective is to hide the fact she’s been excluded from school, and her superobjective is that she wants to get out of the town.

What Do Your Characters Need?

In a traditional plot structure, at some point a protagonist will come to realise that they can’t have what they want, but if they complete the quest, they can have something better - the thing that they need. In Frozen, Anna wants romantic love, but what she needs is to heal her relationship with her sister. I might want to impress people, but what I need is to connect with them. The Science Of Storytelling by Will Storr (an absolute favourite writing book of mine! I will do a deep dive into why in a future newsletter) contains an absolutely excellent appendix in which Storr outlines an approach to character development he calls the “sacred flaw”. The sacred flaw is something the character incorrectly believes about the world - a belief they developed in childhood or young adulthood, that completely informs their behaviour and keeps them unhappy and trapped. Under Storr’s model, the thing that the protagonist needs is to unpick this flaw - to overcome their own biases and come to see the world clearly. The most satisfying character needs are deep and psychological - the process of meeting them will usually be one of healing rather than discovery. 

I won’t tell you what Alex needs - as the second half of most plots are driven by the thing that the character needs, it’s too much of a spoiler.

On Likeability

I recently went to see Eliza Clark discussing her new book Penance, and she had a question about unlikeable characters, and how to balance them, round them out. What she said really stuck with me - she suggested that in order to round out a character who does bad things, it’s not necessary to add “goodness” to them. We are not trying to make our characters morally neutral - merely human. She said she finds the most effective way of doing this is to add an element of cringe. That the most heinous bastard (I’m sure it’s already clear I’m paraphrasing here) can be made into a fully realised person if we see them fall on their arse in Tescos. What are other concepts, like embarrassment, that do not carry any moral weight, but are instead just… really human? 

Back to my example of Alex - the thing that I gave her to balance out the spikiness (which was a real problem in earlier drafts) was a love of nature. This didn’t just make her a more three dimensional character (although it did) - it also helped me to really unlock the themes of the novel and find ways to bind them in. The exam she’s waiting on the result from isn’t English Lit - it’s Geography, of course, because a key part of the setting is coastal erosion, and Alex loves nature. And the book she has in her bag isn’t A Midsummer Nights Dream - this is not a story about misunderstandings and balmy nights. It’s The Tempest - a harsh tale of storms and displacement and fathers.

In literary fiction, everything stems from character, and the care and time you put into developing these characters will radiate out into your story and your world. 

And that’s how to create a character! Easy, right? Not extremely time consuming and potentially prompting you to confront aspects of your own character that might be uncomfortable to think about at all, right? No, great, thought not.

As ever please do email or comment with any questions or areas you’d like me to cover in the future. And if you want to know more about Alex, you can pre order my book.