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Varying your characters when writing fiction is to set for your self goals the characters are to achieve and you must create them accordingly. You cannot have them believable if you don't keep them to their own persona. Make each one different and show how positive and negative characteristics play against one another in the interactions that make for new and exciting fiction. In other words, to make the story exciting and believable and moving, pit one character trait against another. Let them verbally battle it out.

The heroine, or hero, the main character or characters that the other characters support or relate to somehow, can be seen through the eyes of the protagonist as well as through the supporters. The story will then be written in third person and will permit the reader to be in on the plot. They will know things that are about to happen before the hero or heroine does. This makes for excitement.

In creating the characters, it is well to develop them fully. Give them names, addresses, and some small historical background, where they went to school, what their likes and dislikes are, how they are seen by others. Give them special little annoyances and habits that is relative to their personality type. Show how they dress, what kinds of television shows they watch,(if the story is in the later years)and every thing about them. This is especially important when creating the leading characters.

Write these down in a notebook and get to know each character fully before they enter the scene. None of these notes will be used in the story, they will only serve as a reference when you are at a loss to see how they will respond later on during the story. You must keep them true to character. Of course you can have them have a change of heart and their ways will change but only if that fits in the plot.

To write a story that will be true to life and one that becomes the talk of the town, there must be problems and larger than life obstacles to overcome. Make your characters true for their time. If, for instance, your story is about Marie Antoinette, or a friend of hers, or about Bess Truman, then you create the character on research. You must be accurate in the facts you present and as accurate as possible about your portrayal of them. How they dress, their mannerisms, what they eat, the social issues they are confronted with are relative to their time.

In writing historical character you have a wide area you can fictionalize as long as you get the dated, the precise words spoken if they were really spoken, and present them as they were at that time. If you mix up the time and the place as Mark Twain did in "A Connecticut Yankee in King's Arthur's Court", you are writing a different kind of novel and the dialog and the suspense and the outlandish actions are easier to write. You simply pit the ancient English legendary characters against the time of Mark Twain's time.

I can visualize a similar tongue-in-cheek novel being written about a big-fat-Greek-wedding type of character as pitted against the time of Aristotle. Greek Women, supposedly, were put down then. It has taken these many centuries later to finally settle the score.

Whatever, make the characters come alive in whatever century time they live in. But try to do it realistically and do not ever add to real historical characters. Many of them have been tarnished enough by half-truths, and with novelist playing loosely with the real facts. It will also help if you have a purpose to your novel; an obstacle removed, an almost impossibility made possible, an ugliness turned into beauty; a lie masquerading as the truth exposed.

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