ASK THE EXPERTS
Expert advice for writers
How can writers create better characters?
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"Stories are about people. The events or settings might be weird and wonderful, incredibly technical, or downright impossible. Your entire purpose in writing a story might be to make a scientific, sociological, or political point or to show off a terrific idea; but your story must be about people." |
BARRY B. LONGYEAR is the author of Science Fiction Writer's Workshop-I: An Introduction to Fiction Mechanics (published by iUniverse). Hugo, Nebula, and Campbell Award winner, Barry Longyear is author of Enemy Mine, made into a major motion picture by Fox.
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"The character or the plot? The answer is—it really doesn't matter. Some writers develop characters that make the plot, while others take a plot idea and then build the characters. What matters is that the two must work together to yield a good book or movie." |
BECKY MARTINEZ is the author of 10 Steps to Creating Memorable Characters (published by Random House Digital, Inc.). She is a former broadcast journalist, and now writes romances, romantic suspense, and mysteries.
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"The best fiction takes characters through not just an external journey, but an emotional journey too. As a writer, you do need a bit of Therapy 101 to help your characters along their own emotional travels. But don't confuse emotional truth with autobiography. You must first give your characters full lives of their own. Edna O'Brien said of Chekhov: He does not write—he breathes life off the page." |
ANN HOOD is the author of Creating Character Emotions (published by Writer's Digest Books). She is the author of the bestselling novels THE RED THREAD, THE KNITTING CIRCLE and SOMEWHERE OFF THE COAST OF MAINE.
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"The characters in your fiction are people. Human beings. Yes, I know you make them up. But readers want your characters to seem like real people. Whole and alive, believable and worth caring about. Readers want to get to know your characters as well as they know their own friends, their own family." |
ORSON SCOTT CARD is the author of Elements of Fiction Writing - Characters & Viewpoint (published by Writer's Digest Books). He is best known for the classic Ender's Game, Ender's Shadow and other novels in the Ender universe.
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"Use vocabulary that fits the character, and not words that show a Masters education—your reader will be more impressed with a conversation that fits the scene than one that requires her to delve into a dictionary every couple of pages. Remember, people don't always speak in full sentences...Characters are people so let the dialogue you give them reflect this." |
KATIE GUSTAFSSON is the author of Prompts for Fiction Writers (published by Lulu.com).
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"Most people read fiction not so much for plot as for company. In a good piece of fiction, you can meet someone and get to know her in-depth, or you can meet yourself, in disguise, and imaginatively live out and understand your passions. The writer William Sloan thinks it boils down to this: 'Tell me about me. I want to be more alive. Give me me.'" |
JOSIP NOVAKOVICH is the author of Fiction Writer's Workshop (published by Writer's Digest Books). He has received the Whiting Writer's Award, Guggenheim Fellowship, and two National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships.
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"You can't have conflict until you have characters. More importantly, your reader can't have a powerful emotional experience without at least one character. That powerful emotional experience comes when you weave such a convincing account of a character that your reader actually becomes that character. Your characters exist so that your reader can get inside the skin of one of them and do battle with the others." |
PETER ECONOMY is the author of Writing Fiction for Dummies (published by John Wiley & Sons). He is a best-selling business author, ghostwriter, and publishing consultant with more than 55 books to his credit.
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"How do you create a memorable character? Focus, it seems to me, is the key factor. Your focus. That is, you select some unique aspect of body, mind, background, or personality in your story person, then emphasize it. Build it up. Exaggerate it. Make it striking and colorful enough that you remember it...." |
DWIGHT V. SWAIN is the author of Creating Characters: How to Build Story People (published by University of Oklahoma Press). For more than twenty years he taught in the Professional Writing Program at the University of Oklahoma. His popular book Techniques of the Selling Writer is also published by the University of Oklahoma Press.
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"Character's thoughts that are there to drive plot should be clearly shown at the beginning of the story, so we can see what will change from the start of the story to its end." |
NANCY KRESS is the author of Dynamic Characters (published by Writer's Digest Books). She is an award-winning author of fiction books.
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"I cannot emphasize too pointedly that, as it has been for me in my career, it is vitally, life-or-death important if you wish to succeed as a fiction writer to think in terms of conflict. To frame your ideas in terms of conflict. And—to create your characters in terms of their conflicts. What do they want, and who or what is in the way of their achieving their goals?" |
THOMAS B. SAWYER is the author of Fiction Writing Demystified: Techniques That Will Make You a More Successful Writer (published by Ashleywilde, Inc.). He is a teacher of creative writing and screenwriting and was an Emmy-nominated head writer and producer of Murder, She Wrote.
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"Thoughts lead us to feel strongly for characters, to worry over them, so that even when they misbehave we feel sympathy for their inability to live up to their best selves. The more you let your readers know, the more they are likely to be interested in the tensions between thought and behavior." |
JEROME STERN is the author of Making Shapely Fiction (published by W. W. Norton & Company). He is a professor of English and popular culture. His incisive monologues are regularly heard on National Public Radio.
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"In making sympathetic characters, it is important to be clear that the goal is not to make a 'good' character obversely 'bad' or a 'bad' character obversely 'good.' Rather... it is to make both types of characters—all characters—contradictorily complicated." |
DOUGLAS BAUER is the author of The Stuff of Fiction: Advice on Craft (published by University of Michigan Press). He is a prize-winning novelist and popular creative writing instructor.
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"Characterization is the bedrock of fiction and the reason most people read it. What endures in our hearts and minds over time is the heroes, heroines, and villains. Less often do we recall their plots. The fiction writer's greatest challenge is character development." |
ELIZABETH LYON is the author of A Writer's Guide To Fiction (published by Penguin Group). She is the author of several books on the craft of writing. She has been a contributor to The Writer and Writer's Digest magazines
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"There are no rules that say that names have to come from name books. Writers have named characters everything from Shorty to Tomahawk. If the right name for your character is something you created, it doesn't matter. As long as it portrays the person the way you see them and communicates that to the reader, anything is possible." |
JOYCE and JIM LAVENE are the authors of The Everything Guide to Writing a Novel (published by Everything Books). Joyce and Jim have written and sold more than forty novels, along with several short stories. They have also taught writers' workshops and classes across America.
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"You need to make certain that your characters face obstacles that ratchet up the tension. You must increase the problems that the characters face; consequently, you'll be increasing the pressure that the character is under." |
ELIZABETH GEORGE is the author of Write Away: One Novelist's Approach to Fiction and the Writing Life (published by HarperCollins). She is the New York Times bestselling author of fourteen novels of psychological suspense, one book of nonfiction, and two short-story collections.
