Continuing my series of tips on writing a novel, this week I’m talking about character. Here’s what I’ve learnt so far about creating well-rounded, compelling characters.

When I first began writing, I thought that characters had to be larger than life and jump off the page. Despite the fact that some of the books that I’ve loved most have featured characters who are unusually quiet or have interesting inner lives, I felt that in order to capture the attention of a reader, agent or publisher, my own characters needed to be the life of the party, show-stopper, grab-the-limelight types.

Character psychology is more important than their favourite colour!

The other thing that I loved to do when I first started was those character profiles, you know the ones which ask you what your character likes to eat for breakfast or what their 2nd aunt first removed is called. Over time I’ve come to realise that those are the sorts of details we know about our friends and family but not necessarily enough to know what makes someone tick. It’s far more important to understand the character’s psychology, after all, we need to inhabihttps://youtu.be/px2oG09e2rct our main characters in order to write them truthfully. The details about a character’s favourite type of cake or the bus route they usually take? That is there to ‘show not tell’ but it won’t create an inner world.

Francine Prose’s Reading Like a Writer has a whole chapter on character which I talked about in more detail last week. Here’s some other great writing books that have helped me with character development:

90 Day Novel by Al Watt

Big shout out to my talented friend Wiz Wharton for recommending this novel to me. I’m not going to lie, I was a little sceptical because of the gimmicky title. But boy, was I wrong! 90 Day Novel encourages free writing. I’ve always been a big fan of this technique. In its basic form, it’s writing in a stream-of-conscious style to start with. All you want to do get any ideas and thoughts onto the page, not necessarily thinking about where they fit in the story or even how they might form a scene or a chapter. More importantly, this book encourages you to write character-based questions that get to the heart of who that character is at the start of the story and where they could end up. There’s a focus on attitudes, emotions, relationships and personality to help build a character-driven story. And not only that, I used to hate writing my first (or rather zero) draft but this increased my daily word count by thousands! Yes thousands.

This book looks at the psychology of characters. Not only that but the psychology of human beings as a whole: why do we behave the way we do? Why are some people much more easy going than others? Storr also breaks down what it is about a particular story that makes it compelling and goes into detail about how the mind works and processes stories. This is not only a fascinating read but helped me understand how to write better stories.
There’s even more tips and book recommendation on character in my weekly Youtube video.
Next week, I’ll be looking at plot and structure, featuring one of my all-time favourite books on writing and one of my all-time favourite novels.
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