Character development can be one of the more rewarding and difficult things when it comes to the writing process. The main character in your story are the primary drivers behind it. You should know the character intimately and in turn make the reader feel for them. Whether it is sympathy, curiosity, or empathy, if the reader does feel a connection on any level with them, they will want to continue reading. Otherwise you will have lost them before they read the first few chapters.
To help develop your character, it is recommended to create a biography card for the main and minor character in your story. On one side of the card, you would want to notate the physical description of your character. The more details you have for your character's description, the better. If your character is overweight, do not just write this down. You would want to describe how they look overweight. Do they carry the extra weight in their midsection or is it spread throughout. Does your character take long or short strides when they walk? What kind of clothes does your character normally wear? These are just some of the questions you could use when you are fleshing out your character. Now this does not mean you may use all of the details in the story, but it will help paint a better visual of your character for you.
When the descriptive side of the biography card is completed, you will want to create the background or life's history of the character on the opposite side of the card. Starting with their birth, write down a time line of your character life. Maybe he moved around a lot because of where his parents worked. You would want to write down which cities they lived in and for how long. Did your character go to college maybe they were a high school dropout. There are countless number of events that your character could have experienced in their lifetime. Like the character descriptions, you may not reference all of them in the book, but they will help create a more personalized character who you and your readers will find a connection to.
When it comes to minor character in your story, you still want to create the biography cards to keep track who is who, but they do not have to be in-depth like the ones you completed for the main characters. Maybe the main character has a old boss, with an English accent and always uses a cane, who shows up in spots throughout the story. By creating a biography card for him, it will help you remember which hand he holds the cane with. It is impossible for most to remember on the small details of the characters no matter if the story is ten or four hundred pages.
One of the major traps inexperienced writers fall into is creating a character who is like them. Though you will have a wealth of experience and knowledge to rely upon, the pitfall here is you may not be able to express this to the reader. If you want to use an experience or two from your life, that is fine, but be careful. If you find yourself playing the main character in your story as yourself, then you need to take a step back and rework the character's biography.
The best time to create these character biography cards is before you start to write the story. This is especially important for the main character. You do not want to have to stop writing your novel because you need to flesh out the protagonist in the story. Creating these biographies will help get the creative juices flowing and you will be ready to go when you being writing the story.