Creating Realistic Characters

Without characters your story isn’t going to go anywhere, as you wouldn’t have a story to write. Characters are the focus point of helping your novel flow from one area to the other. How these characters behave can cause conflicts between each other which is needed for your creative piece.

The best type of characters are the realistic ones. Why? Because they are the ones that we can feel the closest to understanding. Even when reading books like The Hunger Games, although we will never go through what Katniss goes through, her emotions and actions are realistic and ones we can relate to.

Here are five tips on creating your characters to come across as realistic:

→ Draw inspiration from your real life:
Think about your friends, and how they add to your life.
Think about the similarities between you and your friends. E.g. You both like football, therefore football might be a topic that will be spoken about a lot.

Also think about how you behave with different people. For example: In real life you act differently to your family compared to your friends. Use this when creating your characters. 

→ Make sure your protagonist’s relationships with other characters change from start to end:

Are they closer to someone who once was a stranger?
Or as your protagonist grows up, do they not see their friends as much as before. 

You need to think about this, because in real life as time changes we also change and we meet new people as well as losing old friends. 

→ Add flaws.

Everybody has flaws no matter how much none of us want to admit. When I’m talking about flaws I’m not saying physical flaws… no one has any of those. But I’m talking about flaws within. Some people might be too self-cent
red, while some might not take time to care about themselves at all. 

The traits that your characters have will affect how they behave. It will also make them realistic because in real life people have different traits and flaws. 

→ Knowing more about your characters than you’ll need.

Knowing what your character did for A-level is good, as it will you understand what they might do as a hobby, E.g. if they did drama as an A-level, they might be in a club and still perform plays, but they might not be a professional actor. Yet, the reader might not need to be told that they did drama for an A-level, they will understand that that character has a love for acting by being in this group. 

→ Knowing the background information about your characters.

This slightly links with all of the points besides the first one. 

Yet, knowing the background for your characters will help you to understand what motivates them, what angers them, etc…

It will also help you know how they will behave to supporting characters. 

All of these tips will help you when thinking about your characters. All of this will create the layers that your characters need. Think about yourself, everything that has happened to you has affected you but always created different layers of characteristics 

To me personally, the best characters are the ones with different layers. They might come across kind and sweet, but they still have a hard front when meeting someone new. 

Just remember, when writing your first draft your characters will never be perfect, and that is fine. You can easily fix it up in your later drafts.

Experiment and trust yourself.