by Gordon Hamilton

Created on: March 01, 2009

There are few things which serve as a bigger turn-off when reading a novel than coming across staid, uninteresting or stereotypical characters. We all know who they are: there is the tall, dark, handsome stranger; there is the dumb blonde with plenty of "physical" presence but only fresh air between her ears; there is the villain skulking in dark doorways with a fedora hat pulled down low over his eyes. All these characters have appeared in ten thousand novels by different names - do you really want them in yours?

The good news regarding creating varied and interesting characters to appear in your novel is that the process is extremely simple if you follow a few straightforward rules. There is no need to drastically alter the way you write or do such as painstaking research - you simply have to watch what is happening on a daily basis in the world around you as you go about your day to day life.

Fiction is not a genre of writing to which I any longer write but when I did so, I had a notebook full of specific, interesting, human characteristics. I used to observe people around me, wherever I happened to be, and when I saw or heard something unusual, I used to write it in the book. This could include unusual expressions in speech, it could include annoying habits of interrupting speech and perhaps repeating the words which have just been spoken by another, or it could include unusual, habitual gestures which a person made. I used to find these characteristics in people at work, on a train or in a bar, there are no limits whatsoever in this respect.

When I therefore came to the stage of looking to develop characters for inclusion in my fiction, out would come the character notebook. I started by creating a name and such for the characters and the essentials which were relevant to the story I was creating. I would then seek to give them an individuality by looking through my notebook for characteristics which I believed would suit in the circumstances and attributing them to each character.

I was, however, always careful never to overdo it. I would give each character perhaps two or three characteristics from the notebook and no more. To give them such as a dozen or more would of course make them unbelievable from the opposite extreme. A careful balance is probably the best way to describe this process.

By getting in to the habit of carrying a notepad and pen in this fashion, and simply watching others around you wherever you happen to be, you too can soon develop quite an extensive characteristics file and improve the variety of characters you create for your novels and stories most significantly.

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