The Writer's Guide to a Good Story

Developing Characters

I want you to think about a person. Not someone you've already written about. Just try to imagine someone in your head. Create a character, essentially.

What is the first thing you think of? Is it character traits, such as honesty, loyalty, courage, kindness, intelligence?

Or is the first thing you focus on how the character looks? Don't feel bad if you do, I'm sure a lot of writers do the same thing. I did, too.

Think about it, though. Do we know what Huck Finn looks like? Does Mark Twin ever tell us? What about Fern in Charlotte's Web?

My point is, in a lot of cases, it doesn't really matter what the character looks like. I understand, you want the person in your story to be beautiful, or not be beautiful.

And I'm not saying that in all cases it doesn't count. ln some, it probably does. But when looks are not relevant, you don't need to stop the entire story to write a paragraph on your character's brown hair or blue eyes.

That's another thing. If you do want to talk about looks, don't just talk about hair or eyes. Talk about how neat or sloppy their appearance is, talk about how confidant they look, etc. And another thing,  do not use typical sterotypes.

Here is what I'm talking about. It's a bad idea to always make the 'nerds' wear glasses and have bad teeth and acne.

I promise you, we don't look like that. And if there is going to be a girl/guy that your main character is crushing on, please don't make he/she flawless and perfect.

I go to high school, and I know that not every senior guy there looks like Taylor Lautner and has a six pack.

And I know that most characters will have flaws, but I'm talking about as far as looks go. Be original. Go ahead. Make your main character have a crush that has braces or acne.

I really hate seeing. "I was crushing on the hottest boy in school, Shane Williams, who had a six pack and flowing brown hair with blue eyes and pearly white teeth."

And then seeing. "I also have blue eyes and brown hair! God I'm ugly. No wonder I only have six to ten friends."

And THEN seeing. "Shane had an equally hot friend with brown hair and blue eyes. I could go for him too."

Where the hell do you guys go to school? The only person in some of these stories that doesn't look like a Greek Goddess is the random girl in the science class that is never mentioned again throughout the book.

Now, there is an exception to this rule which I will be talking about.

Hopefully some of you will have heard of stock characters. With these characters, it's perfectly okay to use the kind of sterotypes that are mentioned above. These characters would be characters like the dotty grandmother, the loyal servant, the mean stepfather, a lot of cliched/trite character ideas used in stories, to be honest.

Sometimes with the use of stock characters, they are put in stories because by the end of the book, their personality changes, and the sterotype is broken. Just thought I'd put that out there.

If you don't want to write a paragraph about it but you still want to show people what your characters look like, I have a tip that might help.

When you write about your character, you could occasionaly insert details. For example:

"She flipped her blond hair over her shoulder."

"His bony elbow poked into her ribs."

Or even. "Everyone knew she could stand to lose weight."

Well, that last one sounded mean, but if you were writing from the perspective of someone who would say something like that, you can put it in.

So I guess that's all for now. Thanks for reading and happy Wattpadding!