Image Credit: Images created in Book Brush using Pixabay photos
Writers of short form fiction, including flash, need to find reliable, sustainable ways of inventing characters. Stories are character led. We’re writing a lot of stories. So we need to create a lot of characters, especially over the course of say a year.
I don’t keep track of how many characters I invent over a year but given I write a weekly flash piece for Friday Flash Fiction and a separate weekly tale to go on my YouTube channel, I realise on writing this I must be inventing at least 100 characters a year (allowing for the odd week when I don’t post due to holidays, illness etc).
Then there are the characters I invent for competitions and for stories I hope will go in a future flash collection. It would be reasonable to assume then I’m inventing at least 150 characters a year. Oh and there are more prolific writers than me out there too. I wonder how many characters they’re coming up with!
Why Stories Are Character Led
People read stories to find out what happens. They specifically want to find out what happens to the characters in the stories. As a species, we are a nosy lot, curious to know what others are up to, including fictional others.
From a writer’s viewpoint, this is brilliant. We want you to be curious about our creations, to follow their stories through to the bitter or happy ending. But that means writers have to invent characters which will interest their readers and, more importantly, keep that interest going until those two magic words, The End, appear.
Characters “act out” the stories they appear in. We should be able to understand their motivations, what their goals are, and be keen to find out how they will overcome the inevitable obstacles which get in their way. We can learn a lot from fiction. We can ask ourselves questions such as would we do what this character is doing given their circumstances.
Without interesting characters doing interesting things there is no story. Naturally when a character wants something, there will be other characters or situations who get in the way for them obtaining that something.
When a story is a one character only tale, as many of my flash tales are, I am showing you how this character did overcome something using them to narrate the story for you. You still need to read on to find out how they did it though. So provoking curiosity in your reader is a crucial step in good story writing. The way into that is via your characters.
Ways Into Creating Characters
No one method of creating characters suits all writers all of the times. Besides, it pays you to have a variety of ways in which to come up with new creations. It keeps things interesting and you on your creative toes, which is no bad thing.
Tried and tested methods I have used (and continue to use) include:-
Pick a trait. Work out what could come from it. Then apply it to a character. Given there are many human traits, you’re not going to run out of possibilities here. Also bear in mind different characters with the same trait can “use it” in different ways.
For example, take the trait of honesty. One character could use that to save someone else’s reputation. Another character could use their honesty to “tell it how it is” and cause diplomatic upsets. Two different stories right there based on one trait and there are many other possibilities open to you.
Pick two or more traits and combine them in one character. We’re not made of just one trait. Your characters won’t be either. There will be a dominant trait, as there is for us, and that could be the “lead” point for your story as shown in the point above. But combine it with others and you can generate more stories.
So again take the trait of honesty and combine it with a character’s wish to avoid embarrassment. Would their honesty break through in their end or will their wish to avoid embarrassment mean they never do tell the truth to help someone else out? There would be consequences from that.
Interview your characters with a few pertinent questions. You’re trying to work out here what makes them tick. Think about what you would need to know to find that out. This will vary from writer to writer.
Use pictures of anonymous people. There are random picture generators here. You pick a picture and imagine if this image was of your character, who would they be, where would they work etc. You end up creating a potted biography here. As you work out your character’s name, where they’d live etc., their story starts to come together, along with the situations you might put them in.
Think of a theme. Then think of someone to suit the theme. If you’re working on the theme of love, you could write about someone seeking love (then ask yourself who and why). You could also write about someone determined to avoid it (again ask who, why, and in this case, whether they overcome that).
Think of the kinds of characters you like reading about. What appeals? Can you apply those characteristics to your own creations? It can also help to know the kinds of characters you dislike reading. Think about why this is and at least you will know what to avoid in your own writing.
Think of a situation you want to write up. What would be the best kind of character to deal with that situation? What qualities would they need to have to make a success of dealing with that situation? What qualities would they need to have to make a complete mess of it and what they then do to get out of said mess again?
I often use a simple template to create characters. Asking who you are, where are you from, what drives you, what wouldn’t you do ever and why etc creates a simple structure for my story too. All I do here is give answers of a line or so. No more than that – this is deliberate.
I want to give my imagination room to manoeuvre but it helps, I find, to give it a good kick start doing something like this! You need to work out as writer what you need to know about your characters. Some absolutely have to know that characters look like. For me, that’s not so important. I value knowing what their attitude to life is far more.
This is by no means an exhaustive list. The idea of the above is to give you ideas to get you started.
Why A Writer Needs to Know Their Characters
If you know what your character is like, then it will be easier to write their story up. You will understand what they would do and what they would not. You will understand something of their background and figure out if that comes into where they are now. Can their background come back to haunt them and, if so, what do they do about it?
I find in knowing my creations, I write their stories with more confidence and I think something of that comes through in the prose. I know where my characters are going, what they are doing, and why. That gives plausibility even to the most fantastic of creatures.
My Time for Some Peace, which I used as my book trailer for Tripping the Flash Fantastic, is a story from the viewpoint of a mother dragon. Her actions and attitudes make perfect sense if you know what mothers, of all species, are known to be capable of – all I have done here is use a fantastical beast set in a matching setting.
Conclusion
The lovely thing about knowing your characters is it doesn’t lead to formulaic writing. What it will lead to is you having ways in which to create characters and from there the stories they will star in. Understanding why your characters are the way they are helps give you plausible reasons for their actions. Readers will go with you on that writing journey precisely because it is believable, even if the setting is fantastical.
Related Posts:-
Read interviews with Chandler’s Ford writer Allison Symes: Part 1 and Part 2.
Read blog posts by Allison Symes published on Chandler’s Ford Today.
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