In a post on DIY MFA, Rita Zoey Chin share five tips for creating dynamic characters. “Reading fiction is almost always an act of empathy: for a brief time, we get to live another life,” she says. “So, let’s take a look at a few ways you can lift your characters off the two-dimensional page and make them multifaceted beings.”
- Know your characters’ desires and obsessions. “Every character wants something because every human wants something—usually a very long list of things, but there are always some desires that rise to the top,” Chin says. “Often, a character’s desires are what sets a plot in motion and spurs the reader to start rooting for them.”
- Know your characters’ obstacles and what’s at stake for them. If your protagonist’s path is too easy, your readers won’t care. “Life is filled with obstacles, sometimes external, a lot of the time internal, and knowing what forces are working for and against your characters—particularly those pesky inner demons—as well as the potential costs they face in striving for their desires, gives you the makings of dramatic tension, and that is the engine that drives your plot forward,” Chin writes.
- Know your characters’ backstories, particularly the events in their lives that have shaped them and the things that continue to haunt them. “Reaching backward helps to create forward momentum as you give readers greater insight into who your characters are—which, in turn, gives their desires and obsessions more gravity and urgency,” Chin says.
- Let your characters speak, and make sure they don’t all sound the same. “Everything about how a character speaks—their word choices, their cadences, their pauses, their tone—along with which things they choose to say, which things they leave out, and how what they say measures up against their internal thoughts, gives us vital information about who they are and what types of relationships they have with others,” Chin writes.
- Let your characters transform. “Just as we map out the plot, we must map out a character’s inner journey, too, because this is where the heart of a story usually resides,” Chin notes. “In order to give our characters the lives they—and our readers—deserve, we have to let them turn. We have to let them transform. We have to let them surprise us.”
