by Elton Gahr

Created on: April 17, 2009   Last Updated: April 29, 2009

Creating a character that is both consistent and yet grows and changes through a story is no easy task. All writers want to create stories that matter and characters that feel real. Yet many writers fail to have their characters achieve much growth and that failure leads to flat character. What do you do then to make a character grow? First, you must know the character, second you must understand what the story is teaching him, and third you must create room for him to grow.

Knowing your character better than the reader is vital to making the character grow. True character growth can't come out of nothing. Instead, it has to be like an iceberg. The reader sees the ten percent on the surface while the ninety percent that they never see supports it. If you want to create character growth then learn about them. Find out where their flaws come from. This can be done in many ways but one of the best are online personality tests. Not only will they allow you to think through how the character might answer but they can often give you new ideas for character traits.

Second, you must understand what the story is teaching your character. If your story is about humility and your character learns to love it's going to feel out of place. If done right the characters are so much a part of the story that if you took them out and replaced them with another character the story would be unrecognizable, but the reverse should also be true. If you took the events of the story away from the character their personality should be different. Not every story needs a moral, but they all need something that changes the character.

Third, you must creating room for your character to grow. It is tempting to begin your main character the way you remember characters in so many of your favorite books, but think about those characters more carefully and it will be lucky that they didn't start the way you remember them. Good characters are characters that start with major flaws. Bad characters start perfect and have no place to go. The truth is that most characters are really two characters. The first one is someone with at least one major flaw. Perhaps he could be a drunk, prideful, a rouge who doesn't care about anyone but himself or simply a bad father. Then create a second character, this character is similar to the first but without that major personality flaw. Now write the story that turns the first character into the second one in a reasonable and believable way.

Once you are able to create deep characters that fit in perfectly with the story and have plenty of room to grow your work is nearly done. A truly flawed character can hardly help but to improve during the telling of a story and the pain caused by the flaw will help you to build a bond between the character and the reader that could never be created for that perfect character at the end of the story.

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