How to Make Your Characters Believable
I
believe the number one thing that will make fictional characters
believable and enable them to come alive on the page is the ability to
picture them as real, living human beings. This means you should be able
to imagine what they look like and how they dress, but that’s not
nearly enough. To truly see them and know them, you should also be able
to imagine their facial expressions, for example, how their lips curl
into a smile, how they frown and whether dimples form in their cheeks
when they laugh. Yet that’s still only the tip of the iceberg, since it
only covers their external side.
Internally,
I think the most important thing when it comes to writing believable
characters is their nature, namely are they loving, aggressive, driven
or passive. This ties directly into their goal in the story, as the ways
they choose to achieve their goal will inevitably make their traits
come to the surface. This is why it is important to know all their
traits, even the ones they choose to keep secret.
Ideally,
you should know at least some of these traits before beginning to
write. Though if you’re more of a seat of the pants writer, you probably
prefer to let the characters reveal themselves during the course of the
story without you forcing any characteristic on them. But when you do
the final revision, you should take care to bring all of their various
traits into a logical whole.
One
neat trick I recently discovered for matching up mannerisms with
emotions or situations is observing actors in movies. Since you know
what emotion they are going through (which may not always be the case
when simply people watching) it is easier to come up with ideas of how
to describe a character that is nervous, in love, sad, angry or happy.
The
advice “Show Don’t Tell” applies to characters as well, and to make
them as life-like as you can, it is always better to show their
emotions, thoughts or actions, rather than just explaining how they
feel.
For
my latest book, The Grower’s Gift, I had a good grasp of the main male
character Ty before I started writing, but my main heroine Maya
developed more gradually during the course of the story. Although, by
the time I finished the book, I got to know both of them as well as I
know some of my oldest friends.
The
future is bleak in the year 2102. The planet is in chaos and the
weather patterns have completely shifted, turning most of the world into
an uninhabited wasteland.
The
rich and powerful of North America have pulled back into the six
remaining megacities, erasing all trace of a central government and
leaving millions displaced by the environmental crisis to fend for
themselves in the dying world.
Sixteen-year-old
Maya has a gift, a power she thinks can heal the earth and make it
habitable again. A gift that she must learn to harness. The school for
the gifted in Neo York is the only place where she can learn to control
her power and reach her potential.
Yet
the school is not what it seems. Ran by the ruthless head of the city
of Neo York, the school’s only objective is to extract the powers of the
gifted and then discard them. Only Ty, heir to the city, can keep Maya
from being destroyed there. But Ty has a secret, and his loyalty to his
family has never wavered.
Will his growing love for Maya be strong enough to save them both?
Buy Now @ Amazon
Genre - YA Dystopian
Rating – PG-13
More details about the author
Website www.vannasmythe.com
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