Know Your Characters

Knowing your character is a must when writing your novel. They are usually a selling point to most stories since you want your readers to connect with them. So, you want to know all about your character and how they will react to things, to make them seem more believable.

This is a task that can happen differently for each character but for this post, it's about developing your main character.

• What is your character's name and age? These are pretty basic when it comes to writing but they can be important. Age will explain a lot of things about how they view things. How the world sees them. Their experiences as well. A 30-something-year-old is going to have way more experiences than a 16-year-old.

• What changed in their life that made this story important? I've read a lot about characters and this is a common thing that comes up. Something has to change in the character's normal life. So what made this change so much more different.

• What was their past like? Someone's past is important to who they are in your current novel. Even childhood scars can still effect them. Make connections with their personality and how it changed them.

• What kind of personality do they have? This connects with the past question. Something might have a huge influence on who they are in your novel. This is important to how they will react to certain instances in your novel. And make sure that you follow it. 

• Name some of their flaws. Flaws aren't the same as imperfections. You characters need to have flaws that will conflict with something in the story. It has to cause some kind of issues.

• What is their culture? Culture can have a big impact on who they are as a person or some of their strange habits.

• What do they look like? This one can be tough. You don't need to know every single detail of your character unless it's absolutely important. If their tattoo is nothing more than a mark on them when they got stupidly drunk and really has no purpose...then we don't really care. But if the tattoo becomes a mark that causes your character to become a target, then we might need to know about it. 

These are the absolute basics of what you need. Characters are another thing you want to develop as your write. You want them to grow. You want to learn somethings about them too. By giving them room to grow, you'll build a more realistic character.