7 tips for creating characters who are nothing like yourself

When it comes to creating characters for novels, the easy option is to come up with a protagonist who is quite a bit (or quite a lot) like yourself. However, someone like you won’t be right for every story, and a lack of variety in your characters will make your books end up seeming one-dimensional and unrealistic.

Coming up with characters who are often completely different to yourself is a common challenge of the novelist – and it can also be great fun, putting yourself in someone else’s shoes to see how they see the world. Still, it can sometimes be difficult to create believable characters that you find it hard to relate to. Luckily, there are plenty of things you can do to help things along.

Create someone completely the opposite of you. As an exercise, write down a range of characteristics and opinions of your own. Then write down the opposite. Think about how you might come to reach those opposite opinions. Even if you don’t use this character for anything, it’s still a useful exercise that can help you see the differences and similarities between people.
Do research. If you are, for instance, a marketing executive and you are writing about a character who is a brain surgeon, a little bit of research will make things much more believable. Even if you aren’t going into the technical aspects of the work, an idea about the kind of routine that the character might follow or the background they might have will be hugely useful.
Read lots of books to see what makes characters believable – and also to see what doesn’t work.
Observe people like the characters you are writing about. In many cases, casual observation should get you the information you need – people watching in a café, for instance, or paying attention to how people react to situations. In other cases, more formal observation might help, such as work shadowing.
Make them up like you make up stories. As authors, we don’t question the fact that we have to make stuff up when we’re constructing the plots of our stories, and this approach can also be applied to our characters. As long as there is an element of truth in there that makes them seem real, there is nothing wrong with making stuff up and seeing what happens.
Use your own POV to enhance them. As someone who is different to your characters, you can provide an interesting, objective view of them and how they are – just as someone who is different to you could provide an objective view of you that you might not be able to reach yourself.
Create an outline and build on it. Just as you would create an outline for your novel and then fill out the details of the plot later, so you can do something similar with your characters. Develop their key traits first, and then start to flesh the out into a living, breathing person. The act of writing a novel is great for this as you can learn about them as you’re writing.