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.

• The next stage - Bringing Fictional Characters to Life - is about helping the readers to get to know the 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...

• Writing mini-biographies for the characters happens during the fifth stage of the Novel Writing Process, the one in which you create a Detailed Plan.

• Working out what aspects of a character's personality you will reveal in each chapter of the novel is best tackled when you put together the Final Plan in the sixth stage of the Novel Writing Process.

But if you are not a planning kind of person and choose to crack on with the writing 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 when you write the first draft. Bringing fictional characters to life is rooted in detail, and you will probably be too caught up in the storytelling when you write the first draft to remember to mention the color of your character's hair, or what kind of hat they are wearing.

That is the idea of working out these things in advance in the form of the Final Plan. That way, all of the information you require for each chapter will be right there in front of you when you write it. You will be free to 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 characters to life during the revision process, that is fine too. Whatever works for you is what is best.

How to Bring Fictional Characters to Life

Ultimately, the only way to bring a fictional character 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 skillful 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 in the section on The Art of Descriptive Writing.

What I want to do in this article is run through a worked example of bringing characters to life for the readers. More specifically, I want to talk about the six ways of characterizing and the order in which you should use them.

After the worked example, I want to talk about the importance of the gradual revelation of fictional characters.

But first the worked example, and the six ways in which readers will get to know your characters, from the first thing they will discover about them through to the last.

These six things correspond, more or less, to the order in which we get to know people in real life - a stranger at a party, for example. A reader gets to know fictional characters in a novel in much the same way...