Getting to Know Your Characters

I’m great with faces, but lousy with names.  I always have been and that translates into my writing.  So how do I overcome that personal deficiency when my characters really don’t have any faces?

When I’m putting a novel together, I create a list of my ‘children’, just like the Dramatis Personae in a play.  I also forget spellings as I write.  So that’s my first step.  The list grows as I create a scene outline and as I do the creative part and write my novel.  I refer to the list throughout my writing experience.  When I’ve done NANOWRIMO (national novel writing month, which is a November thing to get writers to write a novel of at least 50,000 words in a month), the list is indispensible due to the high draft speed.

For my main characters, I also write out little biographies and personality sketches.  It’s like building a personal world for your characters.  The more you know the character, the easier it is for you to write about that person consistently and build inner conflict within the person, because you know them better.  If I do a good job at that (and sometimes I do better than at others), I can go on autopilot with the character and that personality will come out the way I want.  That’s the ‘face’-remembering part and that’s important to creating a believable character.

Creating a character sketch can also help you write interesting twists in your work and get a better reaction from your character.  It’s not just about the character, but how he/she reacts to the plot and other characters.  The better you know your character, the more he/she/it will contribute to your story.