Welcome to the Writing Gym!

It is popular and trendy to say that the characters completely drive the story and the author merely follows them around and chronicles the adventure. "Oh, characters just come into my imagination, hats in hand, begging to show me their lives. I grab my pencil and follow!"

I'm very skeptical of this.

I doubt that Melville thought of Ahab first when writing Moby Dick: "Crazed sea captain chasing...chasing what? A squid? Jellyfish? Immigrants?"

Ideas come to me as plots and I then create interesting characters to fit that situation. Then I follow the characters as they race naturally across my plot.

You may work differently, of course.

The point is that once you have your characters, they should act consistently with who they are.

Refer to the following guidelines when depicting characters:

A story is the development of a character through adversity.
Compelling characters suffer.
Use names that are neither cliche or too unusual.
Establish the characters quickly and subtly.
Be suspicious of any character easily described.
Don't introduce too many characters at once.
Make your characters memorable with your description.
No one really cares what your characters look like.
Use dialogue to characterize.
Use action to characterize.
Use summary to characterize, if necessary.

A story is the development of a character through adversity.

William Faulkner said during his acceptance speech for the Nobel Prize:

"[T]he young man or woman writing today has forgotten the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself which alone can make good writing because only that is worth writing about, worth the agony and the sweat."

The only thing worth writing about (or reading about) is human beings. It may be a long time until you realize that. You may focus on ideas or alien races or machines, but what fascinates us all are the people involved with those things. It's fine to have just an idea. But what person hurts the most from that idea? Who learns? Who grows?

Your story at one level should be about how a person changes from the beginning to the end. That person can get better or worse. He or she can win, lose, or stagnate. At the end, though, that character should be different in some way. Better off. Worse off. Wiser.

When you select a character on whom to focus for viewpoint and voice, choose the character with the most to gain or lose, with the most to learn. That's the fascinating person.

Compelling characters suffer.

When writers evict their demons through their writing, it is easy to imagine a character (similar to the writer, of course) with the power and talent to smite enemies, woo the opposite sex, and succeed dramatically.

Those fantasies don't make for interesting story telling.

What keeps readers flipping pages is a seemingly unsolvable problem facing a character unready to cope with it. How will the character grow to meet the challenge? What will he or she do?

The complications of a problem and the prolonged suffering of a character are what make stories interesting. How frustrated are you at the end of a book when a character is left in peril? Do you buy the next book? More often than you'd admit, yes.

The key to character development in fiction is that a character must face a string of problems of increasing complexity and must learn something about himself or herself while solving every problem. It can't be easy. The character can't be ready. He or she must grow to face the challenge, and the reader will grow as well.

Use names that are neither cliche or too unusual.

Many beginning writers either choose names that are so realistic that they are commonplace (Anne, Tim, Fred), or that are so unusual that they distract (Oolalume, Muffa Thucker).

The name of a character is very important. Readers associate characters by their names, so be careful which you choose. Common names evoke common people, which might be exactly what you want in some cases. Other names remind readers of celebrities, politicians, or friends. You have no way of knowing you've named a character after a reader's ex-husband, but you do know not to name a character Hitler, right?

I suggest baby name books to select the proper names for characters. I have a wonderful book called The Baby Name Survey in which researchers have identified what people associate with a name. This may be more important than the meaning. You don't want to name your strong, muscular sword-swinging hero Norman when everyone associates that name with being a geek. Choose a name that evokes the character.

Establish the characters quickly and subtly.

Readers are looking for an anchor in the new world you've created for them, so provide a character as soon as possible as a point of reference, a friend for your reader in your universe. Show this character saying or doing something that immediately tells us who he or she is.

Drake scowled and shook his watch. It had been an hour since she left.

Immediately, we know Drake is impatient. Whether he is impatient all the time or not remains to be seen in future characterization.

On the other side of this guideline is the warning that you shouldn't have your character doing something superfluous that distracts the reader. If Drake is an impatient person waiting for his friends to come back, we don't have to show him reading a book while he's waiting if that isn't our focus.

Avoid the temptation to simply summarize a character at the beginning of a story:

Victor was a dwarf, barely tall enough to see over the top of the bar where he spent most of his days trying deperately to kill whatever brain cells stored the memories of Julietta, his dead wife.

No need to club your reader over the head with a piece of plywood.

Victor swirled a tarnished wedding ring in a puddle of beer on the bar.

Still not perfect, but better.

Be suspicious of any character easily described.

We've all seen rich men who are fat, smart people who wear glasses, or stupid people who speak like hillbillies. These people do not belong in your fiction.

It's easy to insert a character in a spot that first comes to mind, and such cliche characters are so prevalent in books, television, and movies that we automatically associate them to certain situations. "Oh, I need a genius here? He'd better have hair that's messy."

Turn the stereotypes around. Create a scientist who rides a motorcycle. Create a Marine who is afraid of people. Create a pimp who carries a laptop.

Ignore the first word that comes to mind when you invent a character. It's probably a cliche regurgitated from something else you've seen or read.

"But this person is based on a real person!" you cry.

All of your friends are probably cliches.

Don't introduce too many characters at once.

My grandfather, who never wrote a word of fiction in his life, offered only one piece of writing advice to me after reading one of my childhood tales: "Don't use so many characters!" Use only the characters who are necessary to your story and introduce them one at a time so they register with your reader.

In The Grapes of Wrath, Steinbeck introduces a lot of Joads very quickly and they all run together for me sometimes. We might not be meant to differentiate them from one another strictly as individuals but as a family facing adversity together.

Make your characters memorable with your description.

This may seem obvious, but I see many published stories filled with characters that cannot be differentiated from one another.

Give your reader something by which to immediately identify your character. Think of popular characters you see in television or the movies. Notice how they have distinctive characteristics that signal the audience, "Hey, look, here comes my character!" Steve Irwin, the Crocodile Hunter, wears the same outfit and says, "Crikey!" and "Aren't you a beautiful one?" in every episode. This is a form of branding that enables us as the audience to say, "Hey! There's the Crocodile Hunter!" If Irwin got bitten in an episode and cried, "Jesus Christ on a crutch!" and then flung the snake into the bushes in a rage, we'd know it wasn't our Crocodile Hunter.

Holmes has his deerstalker cap. Harry Potter has his glasses. Gandalf has his staff and pointy hat.

Give your reader a flag to watch for.

It is possible, like with any guideline, to follow this too far and create a menagerie of Ed Wood-like characters all displaying various aspects of insanity in your story.

No one really cares what your characters look like.

The corollary to the rule above is that aside from his or her actions and a few pertinent features, you don't have to describe your people in great detail.

Don't take a paragraph to describe what a person looks like unless he or she has a pus-filled hump surging from his or her back and it's integral to the story. Yeah, men are tall. Eyes are red and blue and green. Who cares?

The less you describe of a character, the more a reader imagines and therefore owns.

Use dialogue to characterize.

One of the best ways to convey character is through dialogue. We reveal ourselves in our speech, and your characters should, too. Steve Irwin displays his enthusiasm for animals and the environment in every word he says, and your characters similarly must describe themselves. Your surly characters must snap. Your happy characters must encourage. Your illiterate characters must grunt.

"I don't think we should do that," said Theresa, rubbing her hands on her apron. "What if the cops find out?"

Use action to characterize.

Another good way to convey character is through action. The motions of our hands, the movement of our eyes, and posture of our body reveal our relationship to our world. Am I standing straight or hunched over? Do I talk with my hands enthusiastically or do I thrust my hands in my pockets and mumble?

Your characters must move and do. They must reveal themselves dynamically throughout the story so the reader can observe and learn who they are.

Ethan's face reddened and bloated like a tick. He crushed the can in his hand into a ball.

Use summary to characterize, if necessary.

As a last resort, you can tell your reader about a character directly. In tone, this is sometimes effective if you want to distance yourself from a character, or if a character isn't important.

Jerry lived in the boiler room beneath the west stairwell at the high school like a troll in a storybook. Since he couldn't be trusted around other human beings, he was permitted to emerge only at night so he and the mop he considered his only friend could sop up the debris left behind by a thousand children who didn't know he existed.

Generally, though, your characters should assert themselves in speech and action. When you must get involved to explain, you've not done your best with the other methods.