5 sure-fire ways to write realistic characters

Creating realistic and engaging characters is crucial for great fiction. It’s a skill that comes easier to some than others, but there are techniques that can help you to develop interesting and exciting individuals that jump off the pages. Here are five methods that can aid you to bring your characters to life.

1. Define the specifics of their motivation. Engaging and well-crafted stories are built upon characters that are motivated. They need a direction of travel and should always be after something. Motivated characters tend to have more dynamic dialogue; their energy will enable you to create scenes that have purpose and drive. Passive characters without motivation can be flat, and their inclusion means that scenes are more difficult to write. Motivation will give your characters a voice – they’ll tell you what they want and how they intend to respond to certain situations.

2. Give them characteristic dialogue. People have all sorts of quirks and qualities in the way they speak. Maybe they stutter. Perhaps they overuse certain words or swear too much. It may be that where they were born and bred significantly affects their way of speaking. Authentic accents and dialect can take a bit more work to ensure accuracy, but when done effectively can shape personas and give flavour to the writing.

3. Ensure they have flaws. For main characters, this is crucial, and the flaw can be an integral component of a character arc, which may be related to a belief they hold or a need they have. More broadly, people are not perfect and characters without flaws may come across as less authentic. They’ll likely be less entertaining to read about as well. Identifying and defining their flaw will help shape their behaviours and aid you to create scenes that are more engaging and entertaining. The flaw may be the result of something that happened to them, or it may be a general feature of their personality.

4. Define their personality according to the Myers-Briggs assessment. This is a test that defines personality across four key areas – introversion/extraversion, sensing/intuition, thinking/feeling, and judging/perceiving. For more analytical writers, defining key characteristics across these four categories can provide more granularity in terms of personality. It can replace the ‘gut feel’ approach and maybe a clearer way of defining personality. Why not try the test yourself and see what the results look like.

5. Map out their history and background. Regardless of whether it’s shared in the story, defining a character’s history and background will help you to know who they are. How they speak, act, and think will be defined by where they are from, their upbringing, and their education. Their behaviours, motivations, and reaction to different situations, however, will be defined by childhood experiences like trauma. It’s not unusual for main characters to have a historical event in their past that underpins their behaviour (and which likely contributes to the character arc that will shape the story).

Engaging and entertaining characters are at the heart of great stories. Using some if not all the tips above will ensure your characters feel real and have tangible, grounded behaviours. There’s some overlap between these methods, so you may not need to use them all. Also, it depends on your own approach – whether you prefer to use your own intuition about a character or need a detailed plan that defines their key characteristics, so you know exactly how they’ll react in the plot you create for them.