The Novel Workshop: Basic Fictional Character...

When writing a novel and even short stories, your characters are going to be what drives your story forward.

You can start off with the best plot in the world, but if your readers don't find your characters believable it's much harder to hook them into a story.

If you already have an idea for your novel, spend a lot of time on the front end as far as getting to know your characters as if they are real people.

If you don't know where to start with this, I created a free online template that I use for my own reference:

The Fictional Character Development Template

Instead of buying expensive character creation software, I created profiles for all my characters using this template--they're all just Word documents. You can expand and change things as much as you want to fit your situation. This is extremely useful when writing a series of books because you want to have continuity. You don't want a character having blue eyes in one book and green in another as a silly example--but in real situations it's better to have these profiles than to have to search through your first book again to find something.

Other useful references are psychology books and websites, especially those dealing with personality.

I also like reading about different fields to make sure my stories are accurate as far as someone's job position. For example, the book I'm working on now is going to have a police detective. I want to do more than enough research to make sure he's portrayed accurately so a real police officer who reads the book won't start laughing at a serious moment.

I learned this lesson early on with an online short story I wrote about a plane crash--a pilot e-mailed me and politely explained things I had gotten wrong about the cockpit layout and the emergency process a trained pilot would go through during a crash. I made the corrections, and it made it a better story. If at all possible, if you have an authority that's in the same field as your fictional character, be sure to run your rough draft past them to get their input.

I hope this gets you off to a good start! If you're a writer and would like to add any extra tips that have helped you in character development, feel free to add them.

Take care,

Tricia Gilliam

You can find out more about my writing at my author's blog and portfolio by clicking here.