by Elton Gahr

Created on: April 15, 2009

The three pegs of the stool of writing are style, plot and character. A story may stand with two of them but never as strongly as with three. Of those three the one that most informs the other are characters. A good plot does not make good characters, and an interesting style is more likely to reduce characterization than improve it, but good characters create interest in your plot and can form a mold for your style to slip into.

Creating this type of character is not easy. To make a truly memorable character the writer must create someone who is larger than life, yet feels complete natural. A man who brings out truth but never looks like he is trying to bring out truth. A character should talk in a way that is memorable yet never in a way that is so noticeable that it distracts the reader. So how do we create this mythical character?

First we must begin to think in a different way about people in general. As you walk down the street begin to imagine what the lives of these people might be like. Make up stories about the man with the gold chains, and one about the man in the blue power suit, perhaps that woman with the three children and bag of designer clothes. A writers should constantly be sifting through the characters he meets in his life.

Next is the understanding of how a character is different from the people you know. The biggest difference between the two is that you can step into the mind of your characters. You can know exactly what they are thinking and doing and why they are thinking and doing that. This can be both a strength and a weakness to the writer and the more you understand it the more you can make it a strength.

Understanding what you need from the character you must get to know your character. The general key to this is that a good character is an iceberg. You see ten percent but the writer still has to know that the other 90 percent is there. This means that in order to write a character that makes the rest of your story go well you must know more about the character than will ever be revealed. Your characters abuse as a child may never be revealed in the story, but because you know it you will tell the story differently. This is an important, because it is real life. No matter how well we know people there are always things we don't know. The same should be true of a character.

Finally in order to make your character the true engine of your story allowing it to fly you must create a character that fits the plot and style. This is a dangerous thing because a character that fits to perfectly can feel contrived but a good character must still be designed for the story he fits into. This means that if any other character were to step into your story the story itself would be different. With this the voice of the character can drive the story and create something truly memorable.

No matter if they are a main character or the most minor of background filler characters are what connects people to your story. Learn to care about these people like you care about the people in your every day life. Begin to miss them when you aren't writing and soon you will discover that they have began lives of their own and all that is left for you to do is write down what happens.

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