Bringing Fictional Characters to Life

Getting to Know Fictional Characters was all about fleshing them out on paper by writing mini-biographies for them.

The idea was to make them live and breathe in your own imagination, thus enabling you to write about them with authority.

This next stage is about helping the readers to get to know the fictional characters as well as you now do.

More specifically, it is about revealing characters gradually to readers by working out what you will say about them in Chapter One, what you will say in Chapter Two, and so on.

Before getting started, a quick word on how this two-step approach fits into the overall Novel Writing Process...

Getting to know characters in a novel by writing mini-biographies for them happens during the inital planning stage of the process: Creating Fictional Characters.

Bringing them to life on the printed page (or working out what aspects of a character's personality you will reveal in each chapter of the novel) is best tackled when you Combine all the Story Elements into a "Master Plan".

But if you are not a planning kind of person and choose to crack on with writing the first draft as soon as possible, you can equally use the information in this article when you check for character portrayal during the Revision Process.

I wouldn't recommend trying to think about the information presented here as you actually write the first draft Bringing characters to life is rooted in detail, and you will probably be too caught up in the storytelling and the language when you write the first draft to remember to mention the color of your character's hair or what kind of clothes they are wearing.

That is the idea of working out these things in advance in the form of the Master Plan - with the details sorted out before you write, everything will be right there in front of you and you can concentrate on the creative act of writing.

But, like I say, if you are not a planning kind of person and prefer to work out the mechanics of bringing fictional characters to life during the revision process, that is fine too.

How to Bring Fictional Characters to Life

Ultimately, the only way to bring a character in fiction to life is with words.

Words are the only raw material us writers have, and the only way you can help a reader to get to know a character as well as you do is through the skilful use of prose.

But this article isn't about how to write great prose...

• All I want to do here is talk about the theory of bringing fictional characters to life on the page - or what you should say and when you should say it.
• How you say it - in terms of the language that you use - will be dealt with later, in the sections looking at Narrative and Descriptive Writing and Dialogue Writing.

What I want to do in this article is run through a worked example of bringing fictional characters to life for the readers.

More specifically, I want to talk about the six things you can say about a character to bring them to life, and the order in which you should reveal these things.

But before I get started, a quick final word about...

The Importance of Revealing Fictional Characters Gradually

I guess this is an obvious point to make, but I'll go ahead and make it anyway...

Don't say everything there is to say about a fictional character too early on and all at once.

You have created a living, breathing human being in your imagination. They feel real to you. You have come up with plenty of vivid, original, interesting details to help you bring them to life on the page.

That's great.

But just because they are real to you, don't think that the best way to bring them to life for the reader is to tell them everything you know about the character on page one.

You must reveal fictional characters gradually to the readers. Start off with a very broad brush and paint a stereotype. Then in the chapters which follow...

• Sometimes add details which confirm what the readers already know about the characters.
• And sometimes make the readers view the characters in a new light, by providing them with unexpected details.

Why this gradual revelation?

Because, just like with a stranger at a party, it is how we get to know people in the real world.

When we meet someone new at a party, it will take us all evening to get to know him. And if we become friends with the man, we will continue to learn new things about him every time we meet, for years to come.

Learning everything there is to know about him within the first half-hour just doesn't happen - and it shouldn't happen in novels either.

Next Step...

Speaking of meeting a strange man at a party, this stranger appears in the detailed worked example I promised you.

The purpose of the worked example is to demonstrate how to bring fictional characters to life on the printed page, so that the readers can gradually get to know the character as well as you do.

So keep reading to learn all about Writing Characters into the Story...