Create Real Life, Believable Characters for Your Stories
Mervyn Love
Believable characters are what every reader of creative fiction wants and needs to read about. They love getting involved with who and what the person is, and often they want to identify and sympathise with the character. Our job, as writers, is to fulfill that need. Developing such a character can be done quickly and easily with a few simple methods.
The secret to developing a believable character revolves around those idiosyncracies which all of us have in one way or another. Sometimes they are quite noticeable, but often they are more subtle and can slip past us until we really try to spot them. Giving your character one or more of these quirks will bring believability to them because readers will think to them selves, "Aunt Emma used to do that," or "Young Jake down the road is always doing that". Making these connections in a reader's mind makes your character more real simply by association with someone who really is real!
Don't give your characters idiosyncracies just for the fun of it (and it can be fun), but rather make them relevant to the storyline in some way.
So what sort of idiosyncracy am I talking about? There are many of them, but I'll give you a few examples to get you started.
Do you know one of those people who have an annoying ability to remember everybody's birthday, anniversary, death and goodness knows what and loves sending cards of congratulations. (Well, maybe not for the deaths!) Think of how this obsession might have a bearing on the story. Maybe they sent wedding anniversary cards to two couples, but put them in the wrong envelopes. What trouble could that cause? What if they saw an obituary of a distant aquaintance and sent a card of condolance only to find that it was not really the friend just someone with the same name?
Imagine someone who loves to use long or obscure words. What would happen if someone else who is less educated misunderstands what the character means and acts upon it?
We all know people who laugh at their own jokes. What if a character tells a joke about another character and laughs, but the one hearing the joke has a high regard/love/admiration for the one who is the butt of the joke and quietly takes exception to them being laughed at. What recourse or revenge might the hearer take against the joker?
A few more obvious ones now, such as someone who: is hopeless at keeping secrets; folds corners of books over; never talks about his past; is always reminded of a story and he just has to tell it. There are many more.
Are you getting the idea? A good way of building an arsenal of character quirks is to observe people you meet or are acquainted with. Once you know what to look for you can soon gather quite a collection!
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