by Kay Geiger

Created on: February 03, 2010   Last Updated: February 23, 2010

If you want to make your characters believable, give your reader a picture of the person you are creating. This can be done in any number of ways. For example,

She was tall, blonde, blue eyed and leggy, but she was evil through to the bone.

This certainly gives the reader a picture, but what about:

She could have been a Scandinavian goddess with her blonde hair, blue eyes and long, long legs, but from the moment she opened her mouth, you knew she was a she-devil, out to cause trouble.

Your story is inhabited by the characters that you create, so decide what tasks you want your characters to perform then you give them the characteristics that best suit the tasks you have allocated to them, remembering that your readers will empathise with characters that are overcoming the problems that they are faced with.

When your reader delves into your story, they want to relate to the characters as if they are real people. The problems the characters encounter become the reader's problems. When the reader becomes engrossed in what your characters are doing, then you have been successful in creating a believable character.

To create a believable character in your fiction you must get to know your character very well, so how do you proceed? Begin by becoming an observer of the people around you. Take notes on how they react in a given situation. Being an observer, you don't have the full story, so ask questions of yourself: how would you react in this situation, how would a child react or perhaps an older person? What could have happened before this situation arose, that would explain a violent reaction to something that perhaps did not warrant the reaction. We have all been in situations and reacted in certain ways that later we feel could have been handled better. Do you remember any yourself? Write down your reactions. These notes will be invaluable later when you have a character that is in the same or similar situation. Having felt these emotions yourself, or observed how someone else reacted, helps make your character believable.

Give your character morals. Then make sure they live up to their morals. A character that has a certain code of conduct and will not deviate from that code, becomes a strong character. We may not like them, and they may be rigid in their ideas, but the development around this character will follow certain rules and the rigid behaviour will in turn create problems for the character to solve. In solving the problems perhaps the character learns

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