How to Develop Characters When Writing a Novel

Get to Know Your Novel's Characters

People are multi dimensional, and so should a character in a story be... but that's hard to do when the writer only has a small 'section' of a character's life with which to work.

So how do you write believable characters, who have a past and a future beyond the novel, and have that full range of character development show in only the pages in your book?

When writing a story, you want to have believable characters - characters who seem whole and have full lives outside of the story you are writing. The best way to do this, is for you, as the author, to know your character inside and out.

You need to know the little things:

• What does he like to eat for breakfast?
  
  


• What's his favorite color?
  
  


• Is he a night owl or an early riser?
  
  


• Where was he born?
  
  


• How old is he?
  
  


• Did he grow up with both of his parents, just one - or neither?
  
  
  

Now, here's the tricky part. Your reader doesn't need to know all this. In fact, if you tried to give your reader all this information, your book probably wouldn't be all that great, because it would really just end up being the life story of one character.

So why do you need to know this information if you aren't going to put it in the book? Because...

We begin to draw conclusions about how people will act and why they act the way they do based on the information we have about them.

With real people in our lives, we do this all the time, whether we are aware of it or not. When we interact with someone, we often have a picture in our mind about how that person is going to relate back to us. We know, from past experience and knowledge about that person, exactly what to expect when we do interact. With a character in a novel you are writing, though, you don't have that past experience and knowledge. Since characters aren't real people, meaning they can't gain life experiences that authors don't give to them, it becomes your job, as the author, to give the character those life experiences.