Writing Exercise Number 86 – Take Your Character on an Outing and Make some Magic

The Long Story Short: Bringing your character to life is more than knowing facts about them.

The Short Story Long: Have you ever read a book or watched a movie and thought about how flat the characters are? Their dialogue sounds as if it could come from anyone. They have no endearing traits. Or maybe you find yourself thinking that you could create a Sim with more personality.

The best characters are the ones who spring to life in our imaginations. They tend to have minds of their own (which is good, but frustrating, because they constantly wrestle the reins from the writer and hijack the plot). These are the characters who stick in our minds. We love reading about them in books and watching them on the screen. This is character magic.

But how do we create it?

One of my favorite authors, K.M. Weiland, writes an amazing blog about writing and story theory. She posted a great thread about character interviews.  Her idea is that we should know everything about our characters, down to what they carry in their pockets. I’ve used her interview technique quite a lot and find it very useful.

However, knowing everything about your character doesn’t necessarily bring them to life. If used wrongly, the character interview can become a collection of dull facts. What you want is to breathe life into those facts and create an interesting, fully-realized person (or Klingon, or lizard person or whatever).

So how do you do that?

For me, the best way to form your character is to take them with you everywhere you go. For example, I recently took a character for a walk down by the creek. Right away, I knew that Nigel would rather have been lounging on the beach in the Mediterranean (which he could afford to do). I noticed the icicles in the trees,  whereas he tugged his scarf more tightly around his neck and complained of the cold. However, when I piqued his interest in something unusual – such as deer tracks – he became less sulky. He relayed the story of how his grandmother once took him for a stroll through a pasture and pointed out the meadow larks.

I could go on and on and on, but I’m sure you get the picture.

It isn’t enough to know the facts about your characters. You also need to know their reactions and responses. That is to say, you need to know the why of how they act. What brought them to this point in their lives? Where are they headed? Answer these questions, and you will truly understand them.

For this exercise, you will: Take your character on an outing and record how they respond.  If you come up with anything interesting, add it in a comment. I’d love to hear about your experience.

 

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