Stories tend to be about people—or animals, robots, plants, and alien life forms that stand in for people. The story consumer wants to identify with someone in the tale, generally the protagonist. But what makes these made-up people seem real enough for the reader to care about them?

At the heart of fiction, artists create story characters. Despite suspicions—or threats—that our writer friends have put us in a murder mystery only to rub us out at some point, fictional characters are generally fictitious. Generally. Even if a real person inspires a fictional character, many changes will occur on the way to the page. The book’s copyright disclaimer is true: “Any resemblance to any person living or dead is merely coincidental.” So how does an artist go about creating story characters? 

Of course, every storyteller has their own favorite methods. Over the next few weeks I’ll share a few of the techniques with which I’m most familiar. I’d love to hear from blog readers about character-creation systems they’ve used or would like to know more about.

Questionnaires and templates

Quite commonly, creative writing teachers advise beginning writers to use some version of a questionnaire to focus their thinking about characters. The questions include basic demographic information, physical description, personality, attitudes, and behavior traits. Using these items, the writer sketches each important person in the story and establish their conflicts, goals, objectives, and motivations. 

However, questionnaires can drill much deeper. Many questionnaires help the writer “interview” their character. They ask about childhood, school days, likes and dislikes, significant relationships, and so forth. Specific genres have their own special questionnaires, with items most pertinent to plots in their milieu. Romance characters may need to share different information with their writer than science fiction characters. Or not.

Some questionnaires focus on mundane aspects of life. They challenge the storyteller to get to know their characters by what is in the refrigerator, trashcan, or on the nightstand.

Personally, I’ve taken bits and pieces of many questionnaires and cobbled together the items I like to address for each character. My character template is an ever-evolving document. Most recently, I’ve added the Myers-Briggs personality types.

Photos, Collages, and Pinterest

Many artists find a visual approach helpful. Pictures aid them as they discover a character’s voice. In fact, a decision I make early on in the character-building process is, “Who plays them in the movie?” Writers find online photos or make drawings to depict their characters. Some use magazines pictures and other ephemera to make collages representing their characters. Writers devote Pinterest boards to their characters’ looks, likes, and lives. Pinterest is great for other aspects of story world building as well. On my Pinterest profile I’ve created boards for my various stories and general world building. My readers can see what I had in mind as I wrote Water of Life.

How can the writer answer all these questions before the story even starts? I, for one, cannot. Writers learn many things about the characters by seeing them behave within the story and interacting with other characters. I go back and forth quite a bit between story and character profile. After developing as complete a sketch as possible, I frequently revisit it. As the story progresses, I make additions and changes. 

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