How Do Authors Create Characters?

To generate blog post ideas, I asked readers what topics they’d like me to address. One question raised was:

What is your process for creating your characters? How do they then become real to you? Something must happen, because they seem alive to your readers.”

Honestly, creating characters doesn’t come easily to me, but it’s something I’ve learned to do better. In fact, it’s one of the topics I’ll be talking about during the fabulous and affordable Northwestern Christian Writers Conference (online; July 24-25, 2020) along with co-teacher Michelle Griep. Many other authors, editors, and agents will also be speaking and taking appointments. If you are an author or dream of writing a book, we’d love for you to join us!

I’ll give an abbreviated description of my process here, though keep in mind every author has her own way of doing things.

Creating characters

Designer’s preliminary sketch

For me, characters often start out as simple outlines in my mind or sketches like this one, until I flesh them out. The goal is to create believable, compelling characters that readers can relate to and want to spend many hours with through the pages of a book. In Christian fiction especially, heroes and heroines should be admirable, likable, or at least empathetic—meaning, even if they start out as prickly, deeply flawed, or behaving badly, I let readers see into their hearts or pasts to learn the reasons behind that bristly façade or poor behavior. But I try not to leave them there. Don’t we all love to see characters grow and change over the course of a novel? I do! I especially enjoy redeeming curmudgeons.