Writing Compelling Characters

In order to write a good story, you have to have good characters. No, I'm not talking about characters that are inherently good. In fact, I'm talking about the opposite.

Writing a compelling character means writing a character with flaws, someone that is human. No one is perfect, no one has all the right answers. And most importantly, we all have bad hair days.

When I'm first developing a character, I try to ask myself the following questions:

• What is this character's quirks?
  
• Do the have a best friend?
  
• Do they have a hobby?
  
  And most importantly....
  
• If I throw this character off a cliff in the middle of the book, would any of my readers care?
  

The last one always holds the most weight for me. If no one cares, then the character probably isn't written very well. Even if this character were the scum of the Earth, someone would care that I killed him off like that.

Of course, the questions above are just the tip of the iceberg. To write a character well, you need to know them inside and out. For that, I use a spreadsheet that outlines everything about each person that appears, no matter how minor of a character they are. After all, each character is the main character of their own story, even if that's not the story I'm telling. Things that happen "off camera" have an effect on how the character acts in my story.

When you wrap all these things together, I think you end up with a well thought out character that speaks to the audience. When you don't think about what makes your character tick, you end up falling flat.

How about you? What do you do that makes your characters 'pop'?

Check out my character study posts to get a better idea of what makes a compelling character.

This post is part of Elana Johnson's blogging experiment. Check out what everyone else had to say about compelling characters by clicking here.