Characters, of course, are the heart of your story. Even if you tried to write a story without characters, you’d have a narrator, someone who experienced events and emotions and provides the point of view.
In an article for The Writer, Joe Sippie offers advice for creating characters who have the authority of real life. Writers going back to Marcel Proust have used the interview technique to get to know their characters, asking about their greatest accomplishments and regrets. Much of the information won’t make it into your story, but some might surprise you. Taken together, your character’s responses will give you insights into their thinking and how they behave. Their likes and dislikes will tell you where they go and what they avoid. These small factors can help you predict how they’d respond to big events.
Once you have some clues to your character, Sippie suggests dropping them into specific scenarios and seeing how they manage. These situations might not occur in your novel, but knowing how your character handles getting fired or reacts to an emergency can give you insights into how they’d behave during your novel’s peak moments. Take your character down multiple paths and see which rings true or provides the most drama or surprise.
“The more situations you throw your character into, the more you can learn about them and how they face different obstacles,” Sippie says. “You will learn if your characters are petty or resilient, if they’re patient or over-eager. Their behavior becomes more known, less unpredictable – which means less editing for you down the road.”
