Learning how to create believable characters begins with a simple idea: readers do not have to like a character, but they do have to believe that person could exist.
A convincing character has wants, fears, habits, strengths, weaknesses, memories, contradictions, and reasons for behaving as he or she does. The character may be admirable, foolish, generous, selfish, brave, dishonest, or some combination of all of those things. What matters is that the behavior feels consistent with the person you have created.
After more than six decades of professional writing, I have learned that readers will forgive an unlikely event more readily than they will forgive a character who behaves only because the plot requires it. Plot tells us what happens. Character helps us believe why it happens.
The objective is not to create a complete human being before you write the first scene. It is to know enough about the character that choices, reactions, conflicts, and relationships grow naturally from who that person is.
Characters become interesting when they want something. The desire may be large: solve a murder, save a business, win an election, escape a dangerous situation, find a missing child, or make someone fall in love. It may also be quieter: gain a parent’s approval, keep a secret, repair a friendship, prove personal worth, or simply be left alone.
A clear goal gives the character direction and gives the story something to work against. Your protagonist should usually want something strongly enough to act. A character who merely waits for events to happen can be difficult to follow for very long. Even when circumstances force the person into action, the character eventually needs to make choices.
Secondary characters should want things too. The detective’s partner may want a promotion. The protagonist’s daughter may want to leave town. The antagonist may believe he is protecting something rather than simply trying to make the hero miserable.
Once characters want different things, conflict develops naturally.
Wanting something is only the beginning. Readers also need to understand why it matters.
Suppose two characters both want to buy the same old house. One wants it because she grew up there and promised her dying mother she would bring it back into the family. The other wants it because the land beneath it may be worth millions.
The external goal is identical. The motivations are completely different. Motivation gives meaning to action. When planning an important character, ask why the goal matters so much. What will happen emotionally if the person succeeds or fails? What experience from the past makes this particular objective important now?
The stronger the motivation, the less often you will have to force the character through the plot.
Perfect characters are rarely believable.
A protagonist who is intelligent, attractive, brave, generous, witty, successful, physically capable, emotionally mature, and always right leaves little room for conflict or growth.
Give your characters genuine strengths, but limit those strengths. Confidence can become arrogance. Loyalty can become stubbornness. Independence can make it difficult to accept help. Caution can become fear. Ambition can damage relationships. Compassion can make someone vulnerable to manipulation.
This is especially useful because strengths and weaknesses do not have to be separate qualities. The same trait can help a character in one situation and cause trouble in another. That is often how real people work.
People are inconsistent. A confident trial lawyer may be terrified of flying. A generous business owner may hold a twenty-year grudge against his brother. A police officer who remains calm during a shooting may panic when his daughter does not answer the telephone.
Contradictions give characters dimension. The important thing is that the contradiction should make psychological sense. Random quirks do not automatically create depth. A character becomes interesting when readers gradually understand how apparently conflicting qualities fit together.
Perhaps the fearless police officer lost another child years earlier. Perhaps the generous business owner believes his brother betrayed their father. The contradiction leads to history, and the history leads to motivation.
Do not explain everything immediately. Let readers discover the person as they would discover someone in real life.
Every character arrives on page one from somewhere. Family, education, work, money, failures, successes, relationships, losses, culture, and previous choices all influence how a person behaves now. You should know enough of that history to understand your major characters.
You do not, however, need to write a fifty-page biography for everyone who appears in the novel. Develop the backstory that affects the present story. If your protagonist distrusts authority, know why. If a character refuses to return home, know what happened there. If two brothers have not spoken for ten years, know what caused the break even if the reader does not learn the full story until much later.
Backstory is primarily a tool for the writer. Use it to create believable present behavior, not as an excuse to stop the story and explain the past.
Whenever possible, reveal character through action, dialogue, choices, and relationships rather than explanation alone. Instead of telling readers that Ellen is excessively independent, show her refusing help when she clearly needs it. Instead of saying Tom is cheap, let him calculate everyone’s share of a restaurant bill down to the penny. Instead of explaining that Maria dislikes confrontation, show her changing the subject when an argument begins.
The reader participates by drawing conclusions. This usually produces a stronger effect than simply labeling the person. Description still has a place. A narrator may tell us that someone is impatient or vain. The important thing is for later behavior to support what the narrative claims.
Readers believe what characters do more than what writers tell us about them.
Characters should not all sound like the author. Vocabulary, sentence length, education, age, occupation, personality, region, and relationships can all affect speech. A retired judge and a sixteen-year-old skateboarder should probably not express themselves in exactly the same way. The differences do not need to be exaggerated. In fact, heavy dialect or phonetic spelling can become distracting very quickly.
Look instead for patterns. One character speaks directly. Another avoids answering questions. One uses humor when uncomfortable. Another explains everything in excessive detail. One swears freely. Another never does. Dialogue becomes more believable when word choice reflects personality.
A useful test is to remove the dialogue tags from a conversation. Can you usually tell who is speaking? If not, the voices may need more distinction.
People reveal different sides of themselves with different people. A man may be confident with employees, nervous with his father, playful with his daughter, and defensive with his ex-wife. All four versions can belong to the same believable character. That makes relationships one of the best tools for character development.
Ask what each important character wants from the others. Approval? Love? Forgiveness? Information? Money? Control? Protection? Distance? Then look beneath the surface at what each relationship contains. Who owes whom? Who is jealous? Who is hiding something? Who trusts too easily? Who has misunderstood another person for years?
One useful way to learn how to create believable characters is to watch how real people reveal themselves through choices and relationships. Relationships provide conflict without requiring villains. Two good people can want incompatible things.
Weak antagonists exist only to create trouble for the protagonist. Strong antagonists have their own goals and reasons. The antagonist does not have to be evil. In many stories, the opposing character believes he is right.
A developer wants to build houses where the protagonist wants to preserve family land. A prosecutor believes the defendant is guilty while the defense attorney believes otherwise. Two siblings both believe they know what is best for an aging parent.
Even a criminal antagonist usually needs more than a general desire to be bad. Ask what the antagonist believes. What is being protected or pursued? What justification does the character give for harmful actions?
Understanding how to create believable characters also means giving antagonists goals and motives that make sense to them. The antagonist becomes more dangerous—and more convincing—when readers understand the logic even while rejecting the behavior.
Believable characters make bad decisions. They misunderstand people. They trust the wrong person. They act from fear, pride, jealousy, anger, or incomplete information. They say things they regret. Mistakes create consequences, and consequences create story.
The mistake should usually grow from the character rather than from authorial convenience. If an experienced detective suddenly ignores obvious evidence merely because you need the killer to escape, readers may notice the manipulation. But if the detective dismisses the evidence because it points toward someone she loves, the mistake becomes character-driven.
A character’s weakness should complicate the story in ways that feel inevitable rather than arbitrary.
Many satisfying stories involve some kind of character change. The transformation does not have to be dramatic. A suspicious person may learn to trust one other person. A timid character may finally make one courageous decision. An ambitious character may discover that winning carries a cost.
Change becomes believable when it develops from experience. If the protagonist behaves one way for three hundred pages and suddenly becomes a different person in the final chapter, readers may not accept it. Plant the steps along the way. Let events challenge old assumptions. Let relationships expose weaknesses. Let choices have consequences.
Not every character needs to improve. Some fail to change. Some become worse. The important thing is that the ending reflects what the character has experienced.
Writers often spend too much time deciding eye color, hair color, height, clothing, and facial features before knowing what the character wants. Physical description is useful when it supports recognition, personality, relationships, or the story.
A scar matters if it carries history. Expensive clothing may reveal status or insecurity. A character who is unusually tall may affect how others react. A meticulously polished pair of shoes may tell us more than a paragraph describing facial features. Select details that do work.
Readers usually don’t need a police-report description of every person entering the story.
Stereotypes are shortcuts. The greedy businessman, absent-minded professor, rebellious teenager, corrupt politician, hard-boiled detective, and kindly grandmother may all exist, but they become more believable when they are particular people rather than collections of familiar traits.
Ask what makes this businessman different from every other businessman in fiction. What does this teenager care deeply about? What does the kindly grandmother refuse to forgive? Specificity breaks stereotypes.
This is another reason personal observation helps writers. Pay attention to how real people behave, speak, avoid questions, handle embarrassment, spend money, show affection, and respond when things go wrong.
Reality supplies endless details that imagination alone may overlook.
You should usually know more about a major character than the reader ever learns. That knowledge helps you make consistent choices.
Perhaps you know where your protagonist went to school, what happened during a first marriage, why she dislikes dogs, what music she listens to, and the worst lie she ever told. Only two of those details may enter the novel directly, but the rest may still influence how you write her.
The danger is believing that because you developed information, you must include it. You do not. Use what serves the story. Keep the rest in your notes.
Before or during the first draft, ask these questions about your important characters:
What does this character want?
Why does it matter?
What does the character fear losing?
What are the strongest qualities?
How can those strengths become weaknesses?
What important contradictions make the person more complex?
What past experiences affect present behavior?
What is the character hiding?
How does this person speak differently from others?
Which relationships matter most?
What mistakes is the character likely to make?
What would this person never willingly do?
What circumstances might force that choice?
How does the character change during the story?
Which details do readers actually need to know?
You do not need complete answers before writing. Characters often reveal themselves during the draft.
When that happens, change your notes.
A fictional character is not believable because you filled out a long questionnaire. The character becomes believable when goals, motivations, contradictions, choices, dialogue, relationships, and history all begin pointing toward the same recognizable person.
Give characters reasons for what they do. Let them make choices. Let those choices have consequences. Then allow readers to get to know them. That is how fictional people begin to feel real. Learning how to create believable characters is less about filling out forms than understanding why people behave as they do.
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–Dan Ramsey, Working Writer