Finding Characters

For a writer, characterisation is vitally important. Here are four approaches to help conjure up imaginative and realistic features for people who are going to inhabit your pages and help tell your story.

First, ideas and traits from your own lived experience. This is a partially autobiographical method. Writers draw upon impressions of themselves to establish aspects of fictional characters. For example, their moods, reactions, personalities, idiosyncrasies, physical features, appearance, likes, dislikes, hobbies, interests, pet hates, passions, habits, dress sense, style, attitude, health, mental wellbeing, humour, tastes etc. Writers can fashion a milling crowd of fictional characters from their own awareness, experience and consciousness.

Second, writers constantly draw upon features from people whom they know, have met or have read about. Close observation of people gives a fertile source of ideas for creating fictional characters. Basing characterisation on people you admire or dislike gives opportunities to draw on observations and personal insights which can bring characters to life on the page by adding everyday touches of realism and familiarity. It may help to make them seem vivid or compelling.

Third, writers devise features from scratch. Authors continually ask themselves what broad components could make up an intriguing character. Sometimes by playing with a contradiction it is possible to devise an interesting idea. For instance, a bald hairdresser, a blind guide, a thoughtless carer, a zookeeper who doesn’t like animals, a pilot who has a fear of heights, a submarine captain who suffers from claustrophobia, a religious leader who is no longer religious… Then there is appearance. Perhaps a young protagonist mimics somebody she admires, perhaps this becomes a fetish. Where could this scenario lead? This technique can help to mesh together emotional, physical and personal traits.

A writer might use old family photographs for inspiration. This could provide elements of a physical description which might lead to considerations of personality. What makes a face look complex or attractive, or ugly? What mood, outlook or expression can you detect in the character’s eyes? Look closely at facial features. What lies beneath that veneer caught on film in a posed or casual snapshot? If a writer can find a stimulus like a photograph, then it may be possible to embody personality around the physical forms.

Fourthly, writers might use a combination of these three methods. They can mix and match qualities and traits from themselves, relatives, friends, acquaintances with purely invented details. For example, you could start with your own facial features, add in someone else’s hairstyle, and then develop a prominent, annoying personality trait, perhaps an impatient, uncharitable or miserly outlook on life and those around. What about a heartbroken romantic with poor dental hygiene, a wicked sense of humour, whose pride and joy is a much loved, claptrap 1980s Ford Capri? Or a pet groomer with allergies to cat fur? Or a driving instructor increasingly gripped with road rage? Reinventing and adapting may help to prevent tired stereotypes or characters with a stale or over-familiar feel. It helps if you can add credibility to characterisation. Contradictions, yes, inconsistencies, yes, capable, flexible, adaptable, but also set in their ways, irritatingly old fashioned, or new age, religious or irreligious, revolutionary, political, traditional, reactionary, flippant, calm, unreachable, somebody who is everybody’s friend but in reality has no friends at all…

Or you could approach characterisation through possessions. What do a person’s belongings tell you about them? What inhabits their living space? How does it shape them?

Characterisation is a literary cornucopia of traits, appearances and mannerisms. A writer can combine endless features, so long as there is a sense of credibility about the final figures to emerge and come to life on the page.