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I was actually looking forward to answering this one when I opened up my inbox because one of my favourite things is character development and character driven stories!
The Basics
The first step in fleshing out your character is setting their traits in stone. I like to use those character questionnaires where you fill in eye colour, hair colour, star sign, likes/dislikes etc.
It doesn’t matter if you don’t fill all the categories in— some like ‘their Starbucks order’ might not be essential to your story or even fit with the setting. But I do like to fill these in even if I know they’ll never appear in “canon” as I feel like it helps me start to see them as a multi-faceted person, and not just a two-dimensional cutout.
I’ll know that my character might like gold jewellery, but detest silver jewellery, and they love sugary coffee, but not tea (unless it’s green), and likes daisies, but not lilies because they smell like funerals. It’s not important to the story, but I can start to see who they are.
Here are a few handy character questionnaires that I like to use:
A big part of making a character more than a dull, flat cut-out is to give them a motivation, a goal (or several) that they’re striving to in your story. Along the way they’ll encounter trials and be bumped further away from their goal, setting up conflict in the story.
What does your character want? Fame and fortune? To protect their family? Love? Just to make it to the next day?
Your character’s motivation should reflect their world, and drive the story, therefore driving the plot. You might want to think about what they need VS. want. A starving peasant is probably more concerned about securing food rather than becoming the next American Idol, while a bored rich, businessman might be yearning for adventure and probably doesn’t even need to think about food. Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs illustrates this idea well:
Character Image
This isn’t an essential step but I like doing it because it really helps me visualise the character fully, but I like to make playlists and mood boards for each major character in my book. I listen to music a lot when writing and I find it helps me to quickly get back into the tone/mood of the story. I use Spotify to put together playlists (I generally make one for the book itself as a whole, and then individual playlists for the characters), but you can also use 8tracks or youtube playlist function. For mood boards, I use Pinterest to pin images of people who look like I imagined my characters, or inspiration for things like hair, clothing, weapons, etc.
I hoped this helped a bit! Feel free to ask me anything, I’m always happy to share some advice (although I can’t promise it’s always the best advice, but still, I’ll try!).
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