Character Sketches
The
creative process of characterization is vital to your book. A tool that you may want to employ is writing
biographical sketches of your characters.
Even though your main character might be a forty-five-year-old man and
the story you are presenting will not incorporate a single thing about his
childhood, you, as the creator of this man, must know every nuance of his early
life. Did he come from a stable, loving
family or was his father a drunk who would fly into rages and physically abuse
the boy’s mother? Was he a good student
or did he struggle through his lessons, barely passing from one grade to another? Was he constantly teased by other children
because he was shy or clumsy? Or was he
the school-ground bully who often challenged others to a fist-fight. Would you find him to be a boy who often
rescued stray animals? As a teen, was
he adventurous?–or rebellious, forever finding himself in hot water, or even in
legal difficulties?
Know your characters well. By establishing his
early character-traits within your own mind, it will enable you to know exactly
how he might react to a situation you place him in as the adult. Let’s say his father was an abusive alcoholic
and wife beater. What effect did that
have on your character? Had he followed
in his father’s footsteps? Had he
resolved the issues he once had with his father? Was he now a crusader against spousal
abuse? Was he a compassionate man as a
result of living with the tension of an alcoholic parent in the home? He can be anything you want him to be but you
have to understand what motivates him because if you do not, your reader will
not. Everything your character does must
be the logical expression of character traits that have been clearly shown to
the reader before the characteristic action takes place. If the action takes place in the very
beginning of a story, the action itself would be designed to establish
character traits. Your characters must
act as the result of a motive. Behind
every human action is a reason. Those
reasons may be conscious or unconscious but they have an effect on how one
reacts to any given situation. They may
be impacted by environment, culture, social standing, religious upbringing, and
various other factors. You, as a writer,
must give your characters strong, logical, and significant motives. These motives may be bad or good, depending
on the character’s place in the story.
Motivation gives your character vitality, purpose, strength, and will be
a character in which your reader can take an interest.
People generally act in character. If you have conceived a character as a timid
and unadventurous man, you cannot abruptly, for no visible reason, turn him
into an audacious daredevil. It is
important that your characters stay consistent throughout your story. If they do not, the reader will certainly
know and reject the story.
Reasons for particular actions are believable when
they are what the majority of people would do under those same
circumstances. Of course, your
characters may change throughout the story and the important thing is that the
change must come from well-motivated reasons.
Keep your characters in
character and they will always be believable.
Become
familiar with the basic human drives that make us act as we do–love, hate,
fear, jealousy, greed, power, security–and know how your characters would react
when challenged by these basic drives.
You can read more about writing in The Metaphysics of the Novel, The Inner Workings of a Novel and a Novelist by best-selling author, Don Pendleton,
available in Kindle and print at Amazon.
~Linda
