During an interview with the Creative Penn podcast, Matt Bird talks about how we choose the heroes for our stories and how we can create distinctive yet believable characters.
“You have to do three things right away,” Bird says. “You might have the reader believe in the reality of your character. You have to make the reader care about the circumstances of your character. And you have to make your reader invest their hopes in this character to solve this problem.”
To obtain your reader’s belief, you need to establish a strong character voice. “If a character has a believable voice, then we love him right away,” Bird says. That voice incorporates both the way your character speaks and what they speak about. Showing your character’s fears and hurts draws your reader in.
Bird also emphasizes the importance of worldbuilding detail to support your character. “Sensory information makes the world come to life,” he says. “Anthropomorphizing nature makes the world come to life.” Bird suggests stealing details from real life to give to your characters, elements your audience will assume could not be imagined. “Think about it in ‘The Sopranos,’ where Tony Soprano’s mom won’t answer the phone after dark,” Bird says. “And you’re like, ‘Oh, that has to be real.’ And indeed, that was true. In the DVD commentary, David Chase talks about how his own mother would not answer the phone after dark.”
Bird suggests keeping a journal of these small details for use in your writing. “Write down stuff. You just have to be constantly on the lookout for details like ‘if bread is cut diagonally, I can’t eat it’. You just have to keep mining your life and coming up with more things like that.”
If you’re struggling to write diverse characters, Bird says you need to do your research. “Watch documentaries, transcribe voices of interesting characters, and try to really get these voices down,” he says. “Obviously, the best thing to do is just get to know a wide variety of people, and write in the voices of people you know, or have gotten to know through transcribing their dialogue from other places, from reality shows, from documentaries, from anything you can.”
