In a previous article, I mentioned that, to begin outlining your book, you need to get your characters sorted out. I stand by that — characters are more important than any other element of a story. It’s the characters who make the decisions that turn the wheels of the plot, who learn the lessons that define the themes, and whose abilities and inabilities transform the choices a writer can make. If your characters don’t work, neither will your book. So, with all that in mind, here’s how to write them!

1. Think Backstory

Now, let’s be honest: backstory is key, but cliche kills. When you’re first coming up with your story, think of your characters as people who’ve had lives and experiences. They had childhoods, parents, friends, enemies, acquaintances, everything you’ve ever had.

What I’m getting at is this: never write a stock character. Please. I’m begging you.

I’m not just talking about “the rogue with a heart of gold” or “the detective who smokes cigars and calls women ‘dames,'” I’m talking about stock backstories as well. If your thief was raised on the streets, and that’s all there is to it, please go back and rethink it. These characters can be done well, yes, but they’ve been done poorly a million times, and odds are, they won’t work at all. Originality is almost always the better choice, and fortunately, it isn’t that hard to achieve.

So, come up with a name, an age, a location, and a date. Randomize it if you want. For this article, let’s imagine a tiny village in Oklahoma, Sept. 1964. In it, there’s a man who’s about 29 years old. Let’s call him Jared. He’ll carry us through this exercise!

1.5 … Wait, You Said There Were Only Four Steps!

Hush.

Now, if you’re writing a book, you need a setting. Your characters will need historical events to remember, locations they’ve visited, and political ideas to believe. Where can your cast’s backstories come from if the world doesn’t feed them?

Try coming up with four major events in your world that your characters may remember. These events can be local, global, or even cosmic. For example, your cast may have just come off of the Watergate scandal. How did they feel about it? What does this reaction say about their personality?

For Jared, Congress just impeached Nixon, and he wasn’t happy about it. Similarly, a forest fire displaced a nearby village last week, and now his small town is far too big for his tastes. Two years ago, the sheriff got shot, and now everybody in town wants gun control, and he thinks they’re idiots. Finally, Carl Albert became Governor of Oklahoma this year, and although he was a stinkin’ Democrat, Jared actually liked the cut of his jib.

Next, think about what happened to them throughout their life. Did someone help them during a trying time? Maybe they had a sister who struggled with leukemia? Try discovering at least eight of these.

For instance, Jared: shot his own foot at a gun range when he was 12, gained a baby sister when he was 23, had a crush on a guy when he was 17 and repressed it to hell, lost his dad to bone cancer when he was 27, married a girl he met in college at 21, divorced her when he was 25, and broke eight ribs when an escaped cow kicked him last year.

Now, think about personal events that might have occurred. How was this person raised? Were they raised by one parent? Two? Three or more? What did their parents value? And, more importantly, how did that value fall apart? For example, Jared’s dad had a strong work ethic, and raised him to overwork himself. Jared’s parents also valued personal strength. Sadly, he now ignores his own mental problems and refuses to confide in other people.

Come up with a list of three of these values and flaws, and jot them down. Now you’re ready to …

2. Get to the Core of It

With their backstory in your notes, you can break down exactly what your character wants. As I’ve always said, the best place to start is with two goals: a primary physical goal and a primary emotional goal. The physical goal is what your character wants from the story, while the emotional goal is what motivates them. Phrase these in a sentence, starting with “to” and following up with some action verbs. Make it pop. Never settle for “to be happy,” find what would make your character happy.

For Jared, these would be: “to claw his way to riches” and “to push away his fear of losing everything.”

I made a little comment in my last post, where I said “contradictory characters are complex characters. Complex characters are memorable characters.” So, how does your character’s emotional goal conflict with their physical goal, or vice versa? For Jared, his anxiety over money actually makes him panic quite often, and all the time he devotes to thinking about what might happen if he can’t reach a sufficient income makes it harder to bring himself to work.

Now you’ve got those two goals, go ahead and make a few secondary and tertiary pairs of goals. In some circumstances, these should override the main goals, because even if someone has a fundamental thing that motivates them, nobody is all about one thing.

3. Characters Need a Personality

Alright, so now we’ve got the core of who they are, their opinions and their life story. Now, we have to define what kind of person they present themselves as. Now, their personality should be obvious, but not too animated. We’re not making cartoon characters here — unless you’re actually writing a cartoon, in which case, go wild.

Start asking yourself how a person who’s lived the life you’ve define would act. Someone who wants to have human connections but whose family refused to outwardly express love might become distant and emotionless, yet clingy and controlling. Similarly, look at each piece of data you’ve collected, and assign a few adjectives or phrases to them. If you wrote down that they, for instance, hated when Richard Nixon was impeached, you could pick “conservative” or “sympathetic to corruption.”

Hot takes aside, given what we know about Jared, we could say he’s “emotionally repressed,” “loud,” “passionate,” “simple,” “anxious,” “hostile,” “blunt,” “rash,” “solitary,” “down-to-earth,” “creative,” “curious,” “picky,” and “desperate for love.”

With that, you’ve now got a list of personality traits — at least fifteen — and some harsh realities about their behavior. Now comes the hard part: You have to fit these actions into distinct dialogue. How does your character speak? What are their favorite words? Based on their backstory, should they have an accent? Do they tend to talk a lot or a little? What topics do they love to talk about? What topics do they hate? Which will they only speak about with close friends or family? Keep the answers to these questions in your mind and your notebook while you write your story.

Now, Jared tends to talk a lot, but he talks about simple, easy things. He’s also analytic and likes to talk about other people more than himself, so he asks simple questions and expects simple answers. He’s quick to anger, but quick to cool down as well, and if someone asks questions that hit too close to home, he’ll blow up like a balloon.

Not all of these things have to be overt — only reveal what comes up naturally. Don’t force the revelation of something dark that happened in their past. Sometimes, only they have to know about that.

4. Never Neglect the Character Arc

You could start your book right now and be fine. You’ve got your character, and if you’re a gardener, rather than an architect — that is to say, if you prefer character momentum over plot outlines — you can go ahead and start right now. But remember to never neglect the arc. The place you leave your character is just as important as the place they began.

If you chart the arc you expect them to take, your story might end up all the stronger for it. Think about where they might head. What lessons will they learn or forget along the way? What do you want to happen to them? If they were in charge, what would they want to happen to themselves? You can jot that down now if you’d like, but to really get a good arc going, you’re going to need a full outline. Fortunately, that’s a topic I’ve already covered.

Conclusion

By now, you should have, or be on your way to having, a dynamic, realistic, externally and internally motivated character for your book, screenplay, or short story. This is usually the most intimidating step to take, so congratulations! Your manuscript will appreciate all the work you’ve put into it. Now go on and get writing!

Godspeed.