Writing Tips

If you have come up with a brilliant plotline and now decided to pen down your novel, the first thing that comes to your mind is how to develop and grow the your novel characters. How can you develop those interesting/fictional characters and make the audience fall in love with them? Now let’s dig down in simple details to build your novel characters.

#1 Give a unique voice to your characters

Your characters must have a unique voice, accent depending on their geographical set up. All the characters must have their own way of communication, dialect just in daily life we converse with people from different backgrounds, accents at work. The readers must be able to identify your characters by the way your characters communicate, speak, yell, abuse, covey, summon, propose. It can be through their accents, slangs, typical jargons, phrases often used in a dialogue.

#2 Give your characters a name

A character is incomplete without a name. Every reader likes to know their favorite novel characters by their names. If you are writing a fiction book, then your characters names will often be judged by the readers. You need to come up with fantasy names that will be enticing to the readers and also hook them to your story. Fantasy names are always a turn on for readers. So put some effort in writing fiction names as the names might serve your story to be a best seller in future. Who knows? We all love JK Rowling’s famous fantasy characters, Tolkien’s novel characters.

#3 Characters must have introduction

Introduction is must for any characters- protagonist, antagonist, love interest, sidekick etc. You cannot simply put any novel character randomly and built a scene. Readers must understand who this character by name, by their voice is or by the role they’ll be playing in your story. Intro of your characters become more cogent once the readers comes to know about the following

• their looks,
• ethnicity
• physical prowess( athletic or weak, tall built, short height)
• Age of the character
• Any identification trait( ring, earring, tatoos, scars, physically handicapped, deformations)
• Voices

Everything matters here. Give meaning to your characters by defining all the above attributes.

#4 Make sure your characters are vulnerable and fallacious

Not only the protagonist but also the antagonist. Often the antogonist is portrayed as very ruthless, powerful and invincible. But they also must have weak side. Same goes with protagonist , even the superheroes have weak link. This is applicable in either genders – Male or female. People love emotions, the characters must be fallacious in activities, beliefs or action irrespective of main lead, love interest , antagonist. Even a robot should be portrayed vulnerable. Robots develop emotions and we have seen so many movies depicting that. These elements of emotions, vulnerability gets the audience hooked on your story.

#5 Give the characters a motive

It is no brainer that the protagonist and antagonist must have a purpose in your story.  You must know the purpose of characters in your story. The side kick characters must serve purpose both in the protagonist and antagonist world. You cannot simply put a random character in your novel serving no purpose or else you will have no plotline to build your story.

#6 Characters behavior must change

As your story moves ahead, characters must face difficult situation forcing them to change into complex characters and thus make the readers wonder about their change. Behaviors must be complex forcing the readers to keep reading till they can understand the skin of the character. This is applicable mainly on the protagonist of the story although any character may change based on the situation. Put your characters in as many challenging and diversified situations as possible and get the best out of them. Also make them unique.

Protagonists should undergo in different phases of life in your story. He/she may be broke/rich/poor whatever his situation would change sublimally throughout the story and that’s how you can keep your readers engaged. One of the most common and super effective strategy is that the protagonist should be in state of conundrum about his/her beliefs and abilities even if your protagonist is a superhero. The sense  of asking questions and adding conflicts within the protagonist will add spice to your  novel.  They must have strong decision making skills yet should be fallacious or futile. Everything cannot go smooth in your story.The more variation you bring in your main character’s role, the story will be in great demand.

#7 Make the novel characters unique

It’s easy to fall into stereotypes and worn-out character tropes, but don’t give in. Work instead to create characters unique to your story, ones that readers will instantly recognize as your own.

Conclusion

It’s your story and you are free to create myriad characters of your choice but building and developing your characters is an important determinant in driving your story forward and we should not forget that. Feel free to share how you develop your novel characters in the comments.