Creating People, NOT Characters will make your Book Sell

The Basics of Character Development

Are your characters coming across as flat? Do you want to know how to improve your character development?

When writing a novel a writer should create living people; people not characters. A character is a caricature.
-Ernest Hemingway

This quote really helped me understand that my characters have to be deeper than what I was creating. I really feel like when I read this it was a turning point in my character development.

So this post is going to be about my process with character development. I do have a YouTube collaboration with Holly Davis from WriteHollyDavis. You can check out the video below.

1. Notebook Junkie

I am a stationary hoarder. So I have several empty notebooks waiting to be filled with stories. This is the first place I turn when I come up with a story and its characters. During my plotting stage, I will write down a list of questions and answers for each character.

2. Visuals

Next, I search for pictures that help me visualize the character. I will start with a Google search. If I don’t find what I am looking for I will then turn to Pinterest. You know I love my Pinterest!

If you search for “Character Inspiration” on either platform you will get a crap ton of images. You can even narrow down your results by adding “Girl”, “Boy”, “Brunette” and so on.

It’s really fun if you are a fantasy writer to add words like “Fairy”, Vampire”, or even “Werewolf”.

Once I have found an image that embodies my character I will print it out to pin onto my character board in my office. Yes, I do talk to them during the writing process if I need to clear anything up. I will also Pin it to a Pinterest board for that character and add it to my character info folder on Scrivener.

Once I have my main cast images I will use Canva to create a collage of characters, such as this one.

I can then use this image as a visual on Pinterest or even add it to the book’s info page on my website.

*For those of you who like to keep all of your research/musings in a notebook you can print out the image and glue it to your character info page.

3. Their Journey

Next, I will decide what journey the characters will take, from beginning to end. I will figure out how they react to obstacles and how they grow during the story. Your characters are normally not going to be the same person at the end of the book that they were at the beginning. Somehow they have to change and this is the phase where I find out how.

4. It’s ALIVE!

The last step and this one tend to go hand-in-hand. This is the point where your characters to being characters and become real people. You ask yourself (or their images as I do) “What would (name) do?

This is the point where you treat them like real people with real reactions.

5. Break Them

During this step, I think of the conflicts they have to face and then I think of how I can make that conflict worse. Basically, I try to break their spirit. I know I am a Bitch.

This gives the character more reasons to give up, so when they give that last fighting try, the reader will be more invested in the outcome.

Sometimes you may even have to kill someone off. Face it we all cried when Doby died.

In this stage, I will also give them flaws. Nobody is going to believe that a character is hot, rich, and perfect in every way if your character is …. You’re writing mommy porn. (Not judging, just saying)

6. Secrets

When I feel like I can’t develop anymore, I will do a few lines of secrets that the character has. I will make a list of things the readers may find out throughout the story/series. I will also do another list of things the readers will never know. This helps so that when I am writing I subconsciously know the reasons why a character acts a certain way or has certain feelings.

That is it for the basic run-through of character development. I will be posting videos and future posts that will go into more detail, so head over to my YouTube channel and subscribe so you don’t miss out.