Writing, Self-Publishing, Book Marketing

Art Imitates Life: Five Common Criteria for What Makes an Interesting Character

Curious about why certain characters steal our hearts? Got a character in mind for your next story or novel, but is something missing from their personality and need a fresh perspective? Luckily, our experienced bloggers and writers have drafted the five most common criteria for interesting characters, which may be helpful to authors and writers when thinking about the direction of their new stories.

1) Details: As readers, we want to know everything, and we hope the content isn’t something we’ve already read. We want the odd, real and fresh details about a character that really help define who he or she truly is, as an individual. Everything and anything relevant about people in life, we want to know about characters as well. What does this character do for money? How do they feel about their job and coworkers? What does their family think? What’s the character’s sexual orientation? Are they married? Divorced? What nuggets of psychology lay forever embedded in their past, and what dreams do they secretly or overtly pursue despite that past, despite their current situation? Even if you don’t use all of these details in the story you begin writing, they’ll undoubted help you conceive of a well-rounded character with real emotions and visceral reactions that will definitely affect your readers.

2) Foils: Other characters, other locations, other inanimate objects even, whether symbolic or not, can also help reveal the identity of a character. For example, a slovenly brother may act as a great foil as a responsible, cleanly sister, the two butting heads, revealing closeness despite their differences. Similarly, an ongoing storm can easily mirror a character’s inner turmoil and conflict, thereby acting as a foil as well. In a very practical sense, no character can achieve a level of interest without reacting and adapting to the things and people around them, so you’ll need appropriate foils to capture the essence of any character as a result.

3) Conflict: You’ll never hear about the story that takes place in heaven housing characters without problems or worries to cloud their current situation, mainly because no reader will be interested enough to finish that story. As readers, we thrive on conflict. A rich character is presented with a unique problem that probably involves his or her backstory in some important way, and this is what makes the story come to life, this is what makes the story interesting. There needs to be risk involved when your character proceeds forward, whether that risk is emotional or physical (or both), or else your readers, like all people, will lose interest and turn to something else entirely. Think about it. Why create rich, potentially powerful characters if nothing is at stake for them? As the old maxim goes, nothing ventured, nothing gain, and the same holds true for characters. That said, the conflict that confronts your characters as a result of their personal choices will undoubtedly reveal even more of their identity, testing their individuality and ability to change (or at least accept defeat) in the end.

4) Natural: You can’t force a character to act or grow, just like you can’t force a person to change who they are. For that reason, characters need to act like themselves. The story needs to flow organically and naturally from one scene to the next, without unbelievable twists that somehow magically affect the character. The character always needs motivation; the character always needs desire; the character always needs to remain believable and real, just as though the reader could bump into this person on the subway or in the elevator. For example, a homophobic character wouldn’t just waltz into a drag show, but on the other hand, that same homophobic character may try to slip into the drag show if his estranged brother is performing that night. Whatever the actions and decisions of your character, make sure they’re properly encouraged to step into the next scene, instead of just forcibly moving them into the next section, thereby locating them in a place and situation in which they would never willingly appear.

5) Contradictions: Nobody’s perfect, and many times, people (just like characters) react unexpectedly, revealing deep emotions and thoughts about which they themselves may not have been aware. Thing is, we’re all walking contradictions. Obviously, the agoraphobic person really wants to venture out of the house, and the small town guy with big city dreams wants to relocate, but in most cases, these characters are not willing to confront their desires, leaving them in a miserable state of contradiction, which consequently makes for a quite interesting story and character development. Like our characters, human beings are a soup of mixed emotion, one that can be incredibly difficult (if not impossible at times) to reconcile. Of course your characters need to act naturally, but giving a character contradictory desires doesn’t necessarily mean unnatural. In fact, these contradictions can become vital to the believability and grace that many captivating characters possess. Just take any of the characters for James Joyce’s The Dead, each trying desperately to achieve some measure of immortality, establishing celebrity, considering children, immortality that none of them can ever practically possess. Think about your characters and how their most intrinsic desires conflict with each other, and you’ll definitely have the measure of an interesting personality.

Have questions about one of the previous criteria? Or have your own criteria for characters? Feel free to post your insights and writing rituals as comments, and the bloggers will definitely respond as soon as possible. Obviously, there’s no definitive rule to divining the perfect character (especially because there’s no such thing as the perfect person), but through our discussion here, we may be able to reveal even more methods of keeping our readers interested well into the future.

March 3, 2009 at 10:25 am jdimos Leave a comment