3 Ways to Create Unforgettable Characters
Atticus Finch
Jane Eyre
Ebenezer Scrooge
Katniss Everdeen
Harry Potter
Scarlett O’Hara
Huckleberry Finn
If you’re an aspiring novelist, those names alone should prompt book titles to immediately come to mind.
If you’re a fan of To Kill a Mockingbird, Jane Eyre, A Christmas Carol, The Hunger Games, Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, Gone with the Wind, and Huckleberry Finn, it’s because of those lead characters.
If you’re not a fan of those classics, it’s time to reconsider your aspirations.
(And please don’t write me about the evils of Harry Potter. Keep Harry from young children if you must, but remember that you grew up on The Wizard of Oz.)
Wildly successful novelists can go a lifetime without creating a character people will remember forever, but it certainly helps us to know what heroes and heroines like those listed above have in common.
While they’re bigger than life, they also feel universally human
They see courage not as lack of fear but rather action in the face of fear
They learn from failure and rise to meet great moral challenges
How do you and I create characters like that?
1—Live it
Draw from personal experience. Your character might be in mortal danger. Call upon what you felt the last time you came closest to serious injury or death.
Or perhaps you recall when you mustered the courage to finally speak your mind and right a wrong. Transfer that emotion to your hero and embellish it to full effect.
2—Imagine it
I must, in essence, become the character as I write: old, young, male, female. I imagine myself in every situation, facing every dilemma and decision, and I decide how I would react and what I would say based on what has happened to me in the story thus far.
3—Research it
When writing about something wholly apart from your experience, conduct thorough research. I can imagine myself as a woman, imagine how it would feel to lose a child, imagine becoming so vengeful that I might want to kill someone.
But to write about a mother who lost a child due to someone’s negligence or—worse—spite, I’d have to interview someone who has endured such a tragedy.
I’ve seen countless movies and TV shows portraying homicide detectives. My father and two brothers were cops, but still I wouldn’t dare write a novel about murder without solid research: ride-alongs, interviews, shadowing real detectives.
In The Brotherhood / A Precinct 11 Novel, my detective character approaches an apartment, not knowing whether someone on the other side might fire a shotgun through the door. I could easily imagine his fear, but for how to properly handle the situation, I had to conduct careful research.
The scenes in the Left Behind series are imagined, of course. I haven’t lived through the Rapture, but I have been scared to death. I was thirty blocks north of the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001.
My imagination must fill in the blanks. What would it be like to live through seven years of Tribulation? What if I were a new mother? Would I consider killing my own child rather than have her fall into the hands of the enemy? Could a mother consider such a thing?
Citizens of Masada faced that very decision in 73 A.D. They killed their offspring and then themselves rather than fall under the power of the enemy and have their children brainwashed, their beliefs obliterated.
Studying history can help you make story decisions that result in credible, believable, heroic, unforgettable characters.
Where have your most unique characters come from?
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