Make Your Characters Specific
Your characters should live and breathe outside of the story. To do this, you’ll need to get specific.
Have you ever gotten halfway through reading a book and realized you could really care less what happens to the main character? I know I have. Drab characters can ruin an otherwise promising story, and it is our solemn and oh-so-exciting responsibility as writers to craft compelling characters from page one.
That doesn’t necessarily mean our characters need to be likeable; it means they need to be real.
Here’s the thing: it’s going to be hard to create characters that your readers will care about if YOU, the writer, do not care about them. If you are only writing your characters in order to communicate the plot, you need to reframe your perspective.
There are a number of things you can do to make your characters more interesting, more heartfelt. In this post, I am going to focus on one particular idea: GETTING SPECIFIC.
Specific details are the secret to good characterization – the very heart of the craft. This strategy can be applied to every single character in your story, from your main protagonist to the random guy they pass on the street on page 97. The idea is to show your reader that this is a real person whose life has been full of unique experiences leading up to their arrival in your story.
Let’s break it down, shall we?
Here are a few categories of character details you might include in your story.
Details about their history (anecdotes and stories from their past – these can be brief, less than a sentence, or longer if the memory is significant)
Details about their habits, activities, routines, etc.
Details about their physicality (appearance, voice, movement)
Details about the way they think (This one is fascinating to me. A character’s honest thinking can be shocking, hilarious, disturbing… It makes them seem real because don’t we all have thoughts that are occasionally shocking, hilarious, or disturbing? Those gut-level reactions to our experiences that we would never say out loud? And if the reader knows what a character is thinking, it can be VERY REVEALING when that character goes to speak. If their dialogue does not match up with their thoughts, we learn even more about the way their brain works. What are they hiding, overcoming or repressing?)
Details about their space (What is their home like? Their room, if they have one? Their workplace? Can we figure out some of the values they hold by looking at their possessions or the way they arrange their space?)
Examples
I went hunting through some of my favourite books to look for examples of gorgeous characterization. Check out the AMAZING specifics included in these excerpts and how the authors are able to give you such a clear idea of a character without wasting words.
I’m going to pry that fat jewel from its setting and jab the pin right through your mercher neck for chaining me to a chair, Kaz thought. But all he said was, “Van Eck.” (Lee Bardugo, Six of Crows)
This is a stunning example of how a character’s thoughts give us insight. In this case, we glimpse his violent nature, as well as his pride. However, we also see that he has learned to keep his emotions carefully contained since the only thing he says out loud is his captor’s name. This makes him feel more dangerous.
Two weeks into the program, everybody was already knotted up into groups. Only two kids stood alone.
One was a tall boy he’d never seen before, whose neck rose out of his striped T-shirt like a periscope. After a full 360-degree scan of the room, the boy pretended to study the ant farm on a windowsill. Ware knew he was pretending because the ants had died off, probably out of boredom, a few years ago.
The other was a seven-year-old he thought of as Sad Girl. Sad Girl stood at the door and cried the whole first day she’d come two summers ago. Her silent tears had about killed Ware. Desperate to stop them, he’d swiped the prized unicorn puppet from a couple of older girls and brought it to her, but she’d only pressed it to her side and kept those streaming eyes glued on the door, her lashes clumped together and heavy. (Sara Pennypacker, Here in the Real World)
What I love here is that the boy and girl being described in this passage are minor characters who don’t directly impact the story, and yet they are so wonderfully specific that they make you feel as if you are really there, standing next to Ware, watching them.
To a stranger, my mother shouting, “Have you tried these grapes that taste like cotton candy? Oh, let me wash a bowl first. Oh, no, all our bowls are in the fridge with Saran Wrap covering our leftovers – here, just grab a fistful instead!” might be mildly overwhelming, but when my father’s brow crinkles and he blasts out a question like: “Did you vote in the last mayoral election?” it’s easy to feel like you’ve just been shoved into an interrogation room with an enforcer the FBI pays under the table. (Emily Henry, People We Meet on Vacation)
Just, yes. This book is so brilliant. It is FULL of specific details about the two main protagonists. This passage is about Poppy’s parents, who are minor characters, and is SO vivid and delightfully specific. Notice how the details about these characters is primarily communicated through dialogue!
Sometimes, if the newsagent wasn’t too busy, they would discuss the latest headlines, or the weather. On those days, Julian felt almost like a fully functioning member of society, one with acquaintances who knew his name and thought his opinions mattered. Once, he’d even booked an appointment at the dentist, just so he could pass the time of day with someone. After spending the whole appointment with his mouth open, unable to speak as Mr. Patel was doing goodness knows what with a selection of metal instruments and a tube that made a ghastly sucking noise, he realized this was not a clever tactic. He’d left with a lecture on gum hygiene ringing in his ears, and the resolution not to return for as long as possible. If he lost his teeth, so be it. He’d lost everything else. (Clare Pooley, The Authenticity Project)
This book is another brilliant study in crafting specific characters. It offers some sobering insight into the way human beings judge one another without knowing the full story.
Practice Exercise
Take each of the sentences below and rewrite the idea using specific details. You want to communicate the same information, just in a more interesting way.
1) He was terrible at keeping secrets.
2) She hadn’t always been this confident.
3) My roommate was the messiest person on the planet.
4) They’d been through a lot together.
5) He was a troublemaker.