Building believable characters for your short stories starts with a character sketch. Create great characters for your fiction.
By Lanee' Blunt
Most new writers hate the preliminary work that it takes to write a good short story. They want to dive right into writing the story thinking that it is a waste of time to put so much work in before you write the short story. This may be fine, up to a point, but the writer has no choice but to come back to the preliminary stage when feeling lost or blocked.
Tips for Developing Characters
What’s in a name? Give your protagonist and the antagonist a name. What do they look like? How does the protagonist dress, and where does she live? Take each character separately and pick them apart. Where did they go to school? Is the character an only child, or does he have siblings. What are the names of the siblings? You will find yourself understanding the story much better than you did with just an outline.
Character Motivations are Important
New fiction writers should always know the motivation of their characters. If you have read a story before and felt like you didn’t care or understand a character, the writer has failed to give a clear motivation. Motivation is what makes us have empathy with the character and helps us to care about what happens to them. According to Orson Card’s book, Characters and Viewpoint, “The most important tool that will help your audience believe in your characters is elaboration of motive.” What does your character want? What will she do to get it? What is she willing to give up keeping her secret?
Write a Back-story for Important Characters
When you write a back-story for your character’s it helps you to understand who they are. First you have to know your characters before you can write about them convincingly. I usually write a back-story for my protagonist. Maybe something has happened to her that shaped her life, a good experience or a bad one. “Secrets lurk in the past and influence how people behave in the present,” according Robert Ray’s book, The Weekend Novelist.
Ask Questions about the Characters and Answer Them
There are a lot of questions that you can ask in the preliminary stage that will lead to good characterization. What is your character’s weakness, what are their strengths? Who is stopping the character from getting what she wants. Does she have an enemy? What is her greatest accomplishment or greatest failure? These are just some of the questions that you can ask for your character sketch.
Writing a character sketch helps you to understand who your characters are and what makes them tick.
Sources:
Orson S Card; Characters and Viewpoint; Writer’s Digest
Robert J Ray; The Weekend Novelist; Dell
