Step Up Your Character Game: Character Building Through Repeated Actions

There are many ways to establish character building in your writing. NaNo Participant Kathryn A. Patterson talks about how you can use repetition of certain actions to show off your characters’ personalities!

I find inspiration for my writing in the usual places: podcasts, the dog park, alien encounters. This year I found a nugget in, of all places, a book about how to build habits.

In Atomic Habits, James Clear discusses the word identity. He traces the origins of the word back to two Latin words:

   • essentitas: which means the essential of something, being
   • identitum: which means repeatedly

Identity translates literally into “repeatedly being”.

How does this affect my writing? Two words: character building.

A character is more than a physical description and clothes. A character needs personality, affectations, mannerisms, and other less tangible attributes. However, writing something like “Sam is a kind and warm-hearted person” falls squarely into the tell-not-show category.

Using the idea of “repeatedly being”, an author can show who a character is through their actions and habits as well as their dialogue. A character who habitually hosts dinners for their friends comes across as social and nice. Someone who texts while driving is thoughtless and selfish. By having your characters repeat specific actions, you show the audience who that character is.

For example, Patricia Briggs has written a series of books around her protagonist, Mercy Thompson. Mercy doesn’t take attitude or crap from anyone, but she also is kind-hearted and smart. The readers learn this from how Mercy gets revenge on people who have done something wrong to her. The revenge is never physically damaging, but also completely memorable. On one occasion, Mercy puts blue dye into someone’s shampoo. Even though she knows the dye wear off eventually, the person is very vain, so it works fabulously as revenge.

Readers also learn about Mercy through her baking. Mercy loves baking with chocolate, and she makes cookies and brownies for her people on a regular basis. The author never outright says: “Mercy shows people that she cares about them through her baking.” Instead, the act of baking speaks for itself.

When I start a new writing project, I use a character template for each of my main characters. There, I record all the details about that character. I started this to help with consistency within a story and within a story universe. But I also use the templates to help me define my characters.

After reading Atomic Habits, I changed my character template to include three new fields:

   • Habits: a record of important repeated behaviors
   • Quirks: a catalog of the character’s peculiarities
   • Behavior Patterns: a description of how the character acts or reacts in specific situations

Not every character gets an entry in every field, but I list the fields so I have a place to put the relevant information.

In preparation for NaNoWriMo, I fill out character templates for all the major people in my story. I use the template to construct the character’s personality, tone of voice, and expected behaviors. That makes it much, much easier to write when November 1 rolls around.

Kathryn A. Patterson lives in a crooked house on a crooked road. Alas, she is allergic to cats so she does not own a crooked cat. She lives in a marvelous world, filled with vampires, werewolves, and magic - oh, my! But she pretends to live in a dull, boring world filled with post offices, taxes, and calculators. It makes her family happier when she pretends. You will find her writing like a fiend during November on every day that ends in a “y”.

Her template can be found here. This template is flexible. For example, her templates for her vampire universe includes fields for characters’ vampire house affiliation. For her sci-fi novels, she adds fields for home planet and other related info.

Photo by Marissa Grootes on Unsplash