by Michael Kellichner

Created on: April 25, 2009

Characters are usually the main focus within a piece of writing. They are what the reader takes away from the story; they are the driving force of actions throughout the plot, and the setting is mostly meaningless without characters to populate it. And in first person narration, everything in the story is filtered through the eyes of a character. Without interesting characters, an entire story can quickly fall apart, even a well written one. To create an interesting character, a character has to also be realistic and unique.

If a character fits into a stereotype from any genre, they are not going to be an interesting character. This means that right away characters that feel like the type of character found in the majority of any genre of fiction should be avoided. Such classic examples are the all-knowing wizard or the in it for himself thief from fantasy, the emotionless alien in science fiction (everyone will immediately think of Spock from Star Trek), and the butler from a mystery novel. Basically, if your character fits into any of the niches you see in fiction, even the really really cool ones (it's hard not to love Gandalf), your character is going to feel like someone else's or, worse, like a character seen time and time again. These characters come off as flat at best, unmemorable at worst.
If these characters are absolutely necessary for a story, then they need to be some shade different from their more famous counterparts.

Remember that characters within a novel are normally the first thing that will make a story believable and keep readers in what John Gardner called "the dream" of fiction. If the story isn't believable, it fails as a story. As such, characters should have the same types of quirks that real people have. People have nervous ticks, varied speech patterns, identifying marks, and so on. But that is only the first impression of a character, the description of what he or she looks like so that the reader has someone to imagine in his or her mind. An interesting looking character isn't enough. The character also has to have an interesting personality and thoughts. And neither of these can be generic or flat. People are motivated and act differently depending on the situation. A character that reacts violently to every situation may be interesting at first, but becomes unbelievable when he reacts violently towards a young girl eating a lollipop in the park. Reign in the reactions and know why a character reacts a certain way. If a character

• 1
• 2
• Next Page >>