Tips on Writing a Novel: Character Building

Shaping a character can be time consuming and involves a lot of thought. What do they look like? What is their complexion? What is their eye shape? What are their personality traits? Do they have any disorders? What is their education? How do they deal with their emotions? What does their voice sound like? What is their main weakness? Are they an introvert or an extrovert? There are many questions that need to be answered before you can start writing. Knowing your characters fully helps you to see them clearly, and this will reflect in your writing.

The first step to develop a character is to write a summary of everything you know about your character so far. Some characters you may know thoroughly before you start writing, others may be strangers. Novelist Sue Harrison states that “if a character is foggy to me as a writer, he or she will be foggy to the reader as well.”

Villains are especially important to create well. If you find yourself absolutely loathing a bad guy, you know the writer has done a good job in creating them. Also villains or corrupt characters should have some reason for their behavior. Avoid making them bad for no reason, try showing a genetic or social influence. And remember, secondary characters, or characters that only appear once or twice have to be just as well- built as your main characters, otherwise they won’t seem like real, believable people, more so just props.

Names

How important is a characters name? Names have to sound and feel right for the character. Sometimes this takes a lot of mulling over, other times it just comes easily. Many writers have put a lot of thought and detail into their characters names. For example, the names JK Rowling uses are significant, and have a degree of historical and literary allusion. Sometimes the characters secrets are in their name.

For example:  “Malfoy” is old French for “bad faith”, and she accompanied it with names such as Draco, Narcissa and Lucious, all evil sounding names. The name Remus Lupin, is full of give-aways. Lupus means wolf, Lupine means relating to a wolf. Remus and Romulus were characters in roman mythology who were separated by their parents and raised by a female wolf. All this adds to the fact that Remus Lupin is a werewolf. Snape perfectly suits his name as it sounds like a cross between ‘snipe’ and ‘snake’, a perfect description of him. Albus is the latin word meaning white, This contrasts to ‘The Dark Lord’, as Albus represents the forces of goodness, as white often represents.

Also a name can give an obvious answer as to what the characters nationality is. If a characters name is Hung Ling, its obvious that he is Chinese, Craig Macduff is Scottish, Adele DeVille is French, Klauss Schultz is german, Kostas Gianakis, is greek, Hansel Svenson is Swedish, Alena Popov is Russian and Abdel Hammad is Arabic.

Physical Description

Of course you don’t have to place so much thought into a characters name, but sometimes the sound of a name can make you picture the character differently.

So how much physical description should you put into a character?

Here are a few quick tips on improving character descriptions:

• Combine a physical description with an action.
• Be specific. Specific words give a better whole picture of the character. Instead of saying, ‘the man had bad teeth’, say ‘the man’s teeth were crooked and stained from smoking’.
• Avoid making descriptions heavy with adjectives.
• Try to place some emotion behind your description. 
• Reveal characters traits through another characters eyes.

Weaknesses

Another important fact is that a truly well rounded hero must have a weakness. Writer John Ames states that, “There’s a law of fantasy and horror fiction that states: The hero must have just enough magic to fight back. A completely invulnerable character would be a dramatic dud because there would be no suspense when he or she was in danger.” A hero with no weakness is unbelievable and boring.

Dialogue

Dialogue is so very important. The most realistic dialogue read is that which is not grammatically perfect. When we talk we don’t talk in full sentences with perfect grammar. Broken sentences, stammering, slang, muttering, catch phrases, certain pauses, emotional responses, all help shape our characters speech. Also putting characters in conflict or tricky situations can help. Seeing how they deal with or react to certain situations will reveal a lot about them.  A way to ruin dialogue is of course to make the characters talk about things that they know already, that is obvious to the reader.  Also boring dialogue that goes on and on, telling information is an easy way to make the reader lose interest. Facial expressions are an important part of dialogue too. Because the human face is so expressive, facial expressions can show emotions that the written word or dialogue cannot.

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