Making Realistic Characters

In light of my previous post, I’ve done some research on how to make and draw characters that are more believable. The first link that I investigated immediately gave me a lot of insight:

Deeper People: Putting Yourself into Your Characters

(reprinted from Holly Lisle’s Vision: A Writer’s Resource Vol. One, Issue 3 — May/June 2001)

This article was something I saved in my favourites tab years ago when I was taking a creative writing class. I had never read it, but I went back to check it out. Granted, this resource is primarily for writers, but it applies across the board.

Lisle describes the “plague of paper people,” which is her term for flat, non-realistic characters that too easily fall into categories, as they have absolutely zero depth. She wrote, “You have Evil Villains, Oppressed Virginal Heroines, Naive-But-Stalwart Heroes, and Smart-Ass Sidekicks, among other common types.” These characters have purpose that only serve as plot instigators. They are not people, they are plot devices in which their personalities (or lack thereof) serves to move the plot along in predictable ways.

To combat this, she wrote the following:

More than anything else, living characters have passions, hungers and desires, and they aren’t all related to the story of the moment.

In creating character for a story, if they start with the ability required or the skills required to succeed in the story, then you’ve created another paper person. Your characters cannot start with the skills needed to succeed, and they need to have more skills and quirks that are required by the story. They need to have traits that make them human. They need to make mistakes, and by no means can they be perfect for the job. The author writes that the easiest way to avoid this is to put parts of you into every character; not the things your proud of, but the things you want to hide from everybody else. This way, it makes it personal and it makes it real. It immediately gives your character depth, because it gives them a background or quirk that will most likely have nothing to do with the plot.

In order to discover yourself more, the author provides a workshop that I highly recommend:

A. Write ten things about yourself that you think are fantastic things that you don’t think other people really appreciate fully about you, or that they haven’t noticed, or that they simply don’t know about. Ten. Really.

B. Write ten things about yourself that would embarrass you terribly if anyone else knew about them. These can be things you have done, things you have wanted, things you have thought, fantasies you have entertained, or secrets you have been keeping. Doesn’t matter. The only thing that matters is that you tell the truth. If it doesn’t hurt and make you uncomfortable to write each of these, you aren’t digging deep enough.

C. Describe your body as honestly as you can what you like about it, what you hate about it, and what you hope no one has noticed.

D. Describe five of the most wonderful moments of your life things you still look back on with pleasure and joy.

E. Describe five of the most painful moments of your life mistakes you’ve made, people you’ve hurt, things that you will probably regret until you die.

F. Write the ten things you are most passionate about. These can be religious, political, philosophical, personal, romantic—these are your causes. You can be in favor of them, or against them, but they have to matter to you. They don’t have to be big; they just have to be yours.

Her final point in the article is this:

If this isn’t hard for you to do, you aren’t digging deep enough.

Making characters is supposed to be really hard and that’s just a part of the job. For me personally, this article adds an extra challenge in that I have to figure out how to illustrate these things. 

Next article: How to Build a Character 

The author recommends that you create a list of names that you can build from that are relevant to the story. She adds that you must establish the basics (Duh) but you also must consider what that character means to the story. What is their presence or actions in the story mean, symbolically? What does it mean literally? Another great point she adds is that every character that your character interacts with (even if only there for a single moment) must be as developed as every other character, otherwise their actions (even if short and fleeting) will not be believable. Every character must be believable and cannot fall into a T.V. trope. They cannot be another “paper person.”

Next article: This Cheat Site for all the Resources you Need

There isn’t much to say about this resource other than the fact that it contains a plethora of resources for one to use in building a character.

Cheat Sheets For Writing Body Language

This resource is excellent because it highlights something that I never really considered. Body language is a huge part of character building. Every great story I’ve ever read describes the body language of every character in a subtle way that only ever adds to the depth and solidification of that character’s personality.

Its a great resource and it will help me determine what pose to draw my characters in depending on their personality. 

Anyway, this is my preliminary research before I get deeper into designing my characters. These resources were helpful and I hope any aspiring writers out there find something helpful in these links like I did.

Thanks for catching up with me!