Character Devolpment

Devon Volkel: Key tips for character development

I think that connecting readers to characters is very important. If there isn’t someone that you can connect within the story, it makes the entire tale hard to enjoy because of the missing components of pure human emotion. I like to create characters that have elements of people I have come across in my life, different diversities and backgrounds that gives the readers a plethora of people to connect with.  

Sometimes I add snippets of my own personal experiences to these characters, making them sort of real in a way and connectable. Being an avid reader, I love to find characters that I can identify with, that way I can be swept into the story and experience it first person. People like having characters that they can relate to and this makes it so that the emotional element of reading is on the front burner. 

Having an emotional element to any story is imperative, you connect with the heroine and feel for her when she loses her love, you’re mad at the villain for hurting your beloved heroine, because you have made a connection to her somehow. Somewhere in her, you have bonded with her and now you want to read further, to know what happens to her, and to see where her life goes. 

The writer found a way to get your heart strings attached to their heroine and I usually try to achieve this by making the characters as real as possible. I add flaws, vulnerabilities, inconsistencies, mistakes, bad judgment calls, accidentally causing harm and the like. I feel the best way to connect readers to characters is making them as real as you can possibly get them.