A couple months back, I wrote an entry on writing realistic dialogue, a lot of which had to do with characters and relationships. In real life, we speak to one another differently based on our backgrounds, education, ideologies, relationships, and more. So when you’re writing fiction, how do you determine these different factors and make them feel realistic? After all, while we may know our characters well (better than some of the real people in our lives), they still lack the time and emotional investment we have with those around us in the real world.

Individuals, Not Monoliths ~ Your characters should feel like real people we might meet in real life. And real people are unique individuals. Even members of the same group are different. Fantasy writing is especially bad for doing this, where the author takes a set of characteristics and applies them to all members of a group—all the orcs are this way because they’re orcs, all werewolves do XYZ because they’re werewolves, etc. Having an entire group represented by one person or set of characteristics is what’s known as a monolith. Monoliths are crap. To use monoliths is to presume that people aren’t distinct, don’t have the ability to make their own choices (e.g. free will), and that one person can be a stand-in for all other members of that group.

That being said, here are just a few of the factors that go into character creation: Hobbies, Education, Fears, Dreams/Life Goals, Interests/Passions, Dislikes, Talents, Flaws, and Beliefs.

So when you’re creating your characters, be sure that you’re crafting them with distinct personalities, interests, and beliefs.

Understand Different Friendship Levels ~ Now that we’ve worked on making your characters complex like real people, let’s turn to their interactions with the people around them. I think when we’re young, friendship is presented as pretty one dimensional. You might have one best friend and everyone else you consider a friend is on the same level. Like so many things, the real-life, grown-up version is more complex. I tend to think of friend-levels based on either things I do with them or things they know about me.

At the top of the list are Coffee Date People—I won’t even call them friends at this point. These are people I enjoy seeing and will have coffee with occasionally. This is also how most of my friendships start, with a coffee date and conversation. It’s incredibly casual and low-risk. I likely won’t bear my soul to them; we might not even talk politics.

In between you’ll have friends who are willing to spot you for lunch, drive you to the airport at 5 or 6 am, donate a kidney to you, and so on. And at the other end of the spectrum are, in this order, the friends who 1) know you have a body buried, 2) know where it’s buried, and 3) helped you bury it.

So figure out how far your characters’ friends would go for them. Again, a lot of this will depend on your characters’ personalities, beliefs, etc. For instance, both my characters Rook and Mina in the Broken Gears series are very protective of my MC, Lenore. Rook, a crime lord, would murder someone to protect her without batting an eye. Mina, however, a doctor, has taken an oath to do no harm, so murder would be an extremely difficult option for her, so it would be interesting to see what other measures she would easily take (hint: that’s shown at the end of Across the Ice).

And don’t forget frenemies, enemies, and unwilling allies! Having a bond (a shared secret, a common goal, etc.) can drive characters too, sometimes even more than friendship. A pair of enemies handcuffed and on the run have to work together, lest both of them get caught or killed.

Relationships Drive Behavior ~ I’ve mentioned before that my older sister, with whom I’m really close, and I can say pretty much anything to one another. Part of that is our personalities, though; we both have really thick skins. If your MC’s best friend is a sensitive soul, though, maybe it’s the opposite. Maybe in that case your MC is really gentle with said bestie and callous with anyone they’re not close to. Conflict handling is yet another really personal issue. Some people don’t like addressing conflict no matter who it’s with, others are perfectly comfortable with it, and others are somewhere in the middle.

But here’s the rub: no two people will agree all the time. And character conflict is a huge story driver. It’s what divides friends and makes them enemies. It’s what can make or break a mission—what if your characters are trying to pull a heist, something goes wrong, and they can’t agree on a course of action? Don’t forget to manage all your character opinions based on what you’ve established as their personalities and use that to up the stakes. In the aforementioned example with the heist, not only are these characters at risk of getting caught, but it’s already been established that they are each others’ strength. And now their team is beginning to fracture. That’s both action and emotion. The more tension you can stuff into that moment, the better.

Dig Deep to Learn More ~ Yeah, yeah, I hear ya. It’s all well and good to say we should do these things with our characters, but how? Well, there are gobs of ways. Here are just a few ideas…

Google It: Search the term “character creation sheet” and you’ll get loads of results back. Hooray! Also, not hooray because, gosh, how do you know which will actually be helpful to you? Learning that just takes experience. Funny enough, I don’t actually like worksheets. My preferred discovery method is up next.

List 40 Things: That’s literally it. And maybe that sounds easy, but it’s actually really difficult to list that much stuff about a person, especially when you don’t know them well yet. The whys are where it starts to get really interesting. I highly encourage you to include why your character feels XYZ way about something for as many items as possible. Why do they hate cats? Why do they want to become a professional rodeo clown? Let your knowledge about each character branch from these random facts (and their whys) as you make your list. You’ll realize pretty quickly how much you have to learn about them.

Make Them Uncomfortable: Pretend for a moment the character you’re trying to get to know never started off on this crazy quest they’re on or whatever. Let’s say they decided to open up a bakery or move to Spain or something totally different. How does that go? How do they cope with that different kind of adventure. Now rinse and repeat. You can get to know characters by stretching them, so put them in a totally new environment and explore how they cope.

Likewise, if you’re trying to sort out two character’s relationship, put them in a trying situation together. I mentioned being handcuffed together earlier, so maybe that. How do these two characters deal with the awkwardness that comes from being handcuffed to each other? How do they attempt to get free? Or they’re stuck on a desert island somewhere. What jobs does each take on? How does each react when they realized they’re stranded? How do they interact? Again, answer all the whys. Explain your rationale to yourself for each decision. Don’t be afraid to explore and try things out. Exploration is about learning about your characters, and you can’t write them well until you learn about them.

Want to discuss how you create your characters? Leave a comment below 👇.

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