How to Craft Compelling Characters

By: David Corbett

The source and exact nature of the curious phenomena we refer to as characters remains
something of a mystery, but the craft of characterization is not.

Although its clearly a cause for celebrationor at least reliefwhen a character appears in the
minds eye fully formed, the reality is that for most of us, this is a rare occurrence. Certain
techniques are required to will our characters to life. We need to draw on the unconscious,
memory, the imagination and the Muse until our characters quicken, assume clear form and,
with hope, begin to act of their own accord.

Can this processso inherent to the success of any novelreally be condensed into a single
method? In my experience as both writer and writing instructor, the answer is, to some extent,
yes. The key is first to understand what your characters require from you in order to come to
life, and then to determine how you can draw on your best available resources to give them
what they need.

CHARACTERISTICS OF COMPELLING CHARACTERS

The most compelling characters are those who appear internally consistent and yet are capable
of surprise. In my own work, Ive found that the art of crafting such fully realized characters can
be boiled down to four crucial elements: a driving need, desire, ambition or goal; a secret; a
contradiction; and vulnerability. Lets take a closer look at each one.

A Driving Need, Desire, Ambition or Goal

The fundamental truth to characterization is that characters must want something, and the
stronger the want, the more compelling the resulting drama. This is because desire intrinsically

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creates conflict, the primordial goo in which character is formed.

Take, for example one of the most memorable characters in American literatureBlanche
Dubois, from Tennessee Williams A Streetcar Named Desire. At the start of the story, Blanche
has lost her family home and has been left with nowhere to stay. Desperate, she has come to
New Orleans to find her sister, Stella, and ask to be taken in.

This is a perfect demonstration that simply by giving the character a deep-seated need or want,
you can automatically create conflict, for the world is not designed to answer our desires as
easily as we might hope.

A Secret

For your character, a secret is that inclination or trait (such as a psychological disposition to
dishonesty, violence, sexual excess, or the abuse of alcohol or drugs, to name a few) or an
incident from the past that, if revealed, would change forever the characters standing in her
world, among co-workers, neighbors, friends, family, lovers. Secrets inform us of what our
characters have to lose, and why.

Drawing on the example of Blanche Dubois, her secret is that through drink and illicit sexual
liaisons, she has become so emotionally and physically dissipated she could not hold on to the
family home.

We are our own best source for understanding secrets. We know our own, and if were
insightful, we understand how they affect our behaviorspecifically, how they make us afraid.

A Contradiction

We all know people who are both shy and rude, cruel but funny, bigoted but protective. This
complexity, which seems to particularly manifest itself during times of stress or conflict, is what

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can make a person inherently unpredictable, setting the stage for the kind of surprising
behavior that can keep readers enthralled, wondering what might happen next.

Our senses and minds are tuned to focus on irregularitiesthe thing that doesnt quite fit,
doesnt make sense, or is simply changing. This is an evolutionarily adaptive trait; it helps in
analyzing the environment for threats. But it also attunes us to whatever is unusual in what we
perceive; contradictions reveal what we couldnt predict, the enigma, the surprise.

Again, lets look at how this applies to Blanche Dubois: She is desperate and weak, hopelessly
vain, with an alcoholics capacity for denial and delusionbut she is also fiercely proud and
resourceful with a surprising steeliness. Its contradictions like these that can automatically
pique a readers interest.

Vulnerability

Nothing draws us into a character more than her vulnerability. When people appear wounded
or in need of our help, we are instantly drawn to themits a basic human reflex. We may also
sometimes be repelled or frightened, but either way, the fact of the matter is that injury to
another person instantly triggers a strong response.

Obviously, vulnerability may be the result of the characters secret: He is afraid of being found
out. Or it may come from the intensity of his need or wantbecause, as we all know, desire can
render us naked in a fundamental way. For your character, the ambition and focus inherent in a
strong desire can imply some form of inner strength, while at the same time rendering the
character vulnerable to being deprived of what he most wants.

Blanches desperation to find a safe place makes her vulnerable, as does the tawdry nature of
her secrets, which threaten to shame her beyond redemption if revealed. In other words, needs
or desires, secrets, contradictions and vulnerability are almost always interconnected.

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METHODS FOR DEEPENING CHARACTERIZATIONS

Often our characters first appear to us as we flesh out the idea for a story. But characters who
emerge from story ideas can often be flat or two-dimensional; this is because at that early
stage, they serve the purpose of filling a role, rather than acting as independent beings with
needs and fears and affections and concerns outside

the story.

Compelling characters are not cogs in the machine of your plot; they are human beings to
whom the story happens.

Some stories begin with the characters, of course, and the narrative emerges from an
exploration of their needs, their defenses, their secrets and contradictions, or some problem
they face. The trick in those cases is making sure the narrative doesnt meander, creating, as
writer Philip Larkin called it, a beginning, a muddle and an end.

But more often in mainstream fiction and especially genre fiction, the novel begins with a story
idea, and the characters need to be fleshed out to keep them from being stock players in the
drama. We might wonder how many uniquely memorable world-weary detectives there can be,
for exampleand yet every year at least one more seems to emerge from the wave of crime
novels crashing onto bookstore shelves. It takes skill and insight to breathe life into stock
characters, something too often dismissed by those who disdain genre fiction as inferior.

So how do we flesh out our characters when they arise from the needs of our stories, or when
they otherwise lack the specificity, uniqueness or power necessary to engage a reader (or the
writer)? The best inspiration often comes from within usand from our experiences with the
people in our lives.

Real-Life Characters

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Near the end of his life, John Updike wrote a poem titled Peggy Lutz, Fred Muth, in which he
thanked his childhood friends and classmatesthe beauty and bully, the fatso and
othersfor providing a sufficiency of human types all a writer needs.

Whether we know it or not, our minds and hearts are populated by all the characters we will
ever needthough we may disassemble them and rearrange the parts into composites for
variation.

To fully tap this potential, begin by reflecting upon the following real people in your lifejot
down their names, fix them in your mind, remember a few details about their lives, their
physical appearances, the effect theyve had on you, and anything else you think would be
important if you were to describe them to someone who didnt already know them.

Include in your exploration:

A family member you feel particularly close to

A family member you particularly dislike, or from whom youre estranged

Your closest friend from childhood with whom youve lost touch

Your closest friend from childhood with whom youre still in contact

A stranger whose path crossed yours this past week

A person you know personally and admire

A person you know personally and fear

The love who got away

The love you wished had gotten away

Your first love

Your greatest love

Your greatest childhood nemesis

Your greatest adulthood nemesis

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The person from childhood who annoyed you the most

The person in your present-day life who annoys you the most

Your favorite neighbor

Your least-favorite neighbor

Your favorite co-worker

Your least-favorite co-worker

Your postman or someone else you deal with on a business level daily

An older person who has inspired you

A child who fascinates you

Someone for whom you harbor a secret crush or feel sexual attraction

Someone you believe has a crush on you

A person who believed in you

A person who thought you would never amount to anything

A person whose life you would never trade for your own

The list can go on, of course; its limited only by ones own inventiveness. But writing out such a
list provides a larger cast of characters than we originally might have realized we possessed. We
can sometimes unwittingly get into ruts, writing variations on the same character over and
overthe overbearing parent, the needy lover, the insufferable phony, the lonely aunt. The
value of using people we know to inspire our characters is that we already see them so vividly
and specifically.

Emotional Triggers

Of course, we know a great deal about the people in our lives, but we dont know everything
and this is why real people provide excellent but not perfect source material for characters. We
will also have to draw on our own lives, at least as a starting point, to fathom a characters inner

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world.

It often surprises me how frequently writers, especially young writers, fail to explore the rich
veins of emotion they possess in their own lives, so they can translate that to their
characterizations.

The most important emotional incidents to explore in a characters lifeand ones ownare:

THE MOMENT OF GREATEST FEAR: This is perhaps the most important emotional trigger,
because almost all of our limitations, failures, frustrations and disappointmentsand thus our
secrets and vulnerabilitiescan be traced back to or relate to some fundamental fear.

THE MOMENT OF GREATEST COURAGE: This may be physical valor, moral isolation or simply
persisting in the face of some dread.

THE MOMENT OF GREATEST SORROW: Think of death, grief, loss.

THE MOMENT OF GREATEST JOY: Its strange how nebulous moments of joy can seemand
what a loss. At what stage in your characters life (or in your own) did the golden moment
occur? Whats happened since?

THE WORST FAILURE: Ouch, I know, but dont shun this moment; from a writers point of view,
its golden (as are all our travails, sorrows, embarrassments and screw-upsembrace them).

THE MOMENT OF DEEPEST SHAME: Shame is connected to self-image, and this moment will be
when that image was seriously undermined in a particularly personal way in front of others.

THE MOMENT OF MOST PROFOUND GUILT: This involves some violation of a moral code. It may

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also make us ashamed, but guilt involves having knowingly done something wrong.

THE MOMENT OF MOST REDEMPTIVE FORGIVENESS: If youve been forgiven for some serious
wrong, its not likely youve forgotten it. Its permitted you to regain your place with some
crucial loved one.

When performing this exercise, my students sometimes get caught up on trying to think of the
greatest such moments. Dont fall into this needless trap. Instead, think merely of one
moment (presumably of many) of particularly strong impact in any one category.

Obviously, plumbing your own life will not provide access to the whole of your characters inner
lives (unless your characters inhabit the same world you do). Rather, these moments provide
touchstones, points of access to begin the exploration into similar moments in your characters
livesa necessary but not sufficient precondition for a compelling portrayal.

Each of these triggers a vulnerability or a secret, perhaps a desire, maybe even a contradiction,
depending on context. By envisioning these scenes in your characters lives, after first exploring
them in your own, you gain key insights into the formative episodes in their emotional lives,
and, with hope, begin to see them more vividly in your minds eye, the better to render them
on the page.

The key is to intuit the character so distinctly she seems capable of acting on her own volition.
Once this happensand as I said at the outset, its a mystery how or why it doesyoure
capable of beginning the dialogue that will form your story, asking your character: Where are
you going? Why? How will you get there? With whom? And who will you have become when
the journey is over?