Makin’ it Real: Character Development–A Guest Blog by Jordan E. Rosenfeld

In the realm of fiction, it’s easy to forget that characters are people too. Put another way, when I was in my graduate writing program, the tough and lovely author, Elizabeth Cox, who sat in on three of my four semesters’ writing workshops, always had this to say: Are your characters real to you? Because if they’re not, they won’t be real to the reader either.

I pondered that a lot. What does it mean for a character to be real to you? After much thought, and lots of editing and writing, I came to these conclusions:

Characters on the brain. You must worry about your characters when you aren’t writing them. Like a good sister or best friend or buddy, if you aren’t thinking about your characters off the page—how their job is holding up, why they’ve hooked up with that jerk again, when they’re going to have that questionable mole looked at by a doctor—then they probably are still only one-dimensional in the realm of your novel.

Know it all. Know more about your character than you reveal on the page. One of the worst ways to develop characters is through back-story—large chunks of summary that fill in everything from the weather on the day your character is born, to the awards they won in high school. That bores readers. But knowing their deepest fears, secrets, past events, missed opportunities and more allows you to build in nuance and subtext that can be played up in your story, through dialogue, behaviors, interactions and more.

Voice. Give your character a distinct, slightly stylized, unusual “voice”—a combination of how they speak, and how they think. Don’t cookie-cutter your characters so that they all speak the same. Think about rhythm and cadence and socio-economic status and word usage and setting and dialect. Read authors who write voice vividly to motivate you (Toni Morrison, Truman Capote, Junot Diaz).

Under Pressure. You develop characters by testing them, torturing them and putting them under pressure. When revising a novel, find out if you’ve put your characters in enough danger/conflict. If too much of a good thing is happening to them, then they’re probably not having enough opportunity for change. Characters show their true colors under duress. Force phobic characters to interact with people who bring up their phobias; put loud, narcissists through humbling transformations; take away love, possessions and hopes from underdogs to create concern and care in the reader (and then give them something even better later on).

Change ‘em up. If your character is the same at the end of your novel as she was at the beginning, there has been no development. The key to character development is to start your character in an unfinished place—something about his life, his self, his family, his soul, his spirt and so on must be incomplete or unsatisfied or in question. By the end of your novel, there will be shifts toward wholeness, understanding, completion, even if he’s not all the way there. Or else maybe you will write a novel in which a person with a seemingly perfect life finds themselves in a “destabilized” but more productive life. Either way—change must come by the end of your book, and it must happen as a result of consequences along the way.

In Scene. Make sure your characters demonstrate their flaws and foibles, quirks and virtues in scenes. Don’t tell us someone is kind—show an act of kindness. Don’t hint that a character has a tick—let them act it out in all its crazy glory. The more you can let your characters speak for themselves in scenes, the more likely they are to be real to your reader.

Jordan E. Rosenfeld is a fiction writer, freelance journalist and editor. She is the author of the books, Make A Scene: Crafting a Powerful Story One Scene at a Time (Writer’s Digest Books) and Write Free! Attracting the Creative Life with Rebecca Lawton (http://www.writefree.us/). Jordan is also a contributing editor & columnist to Writer’s Digest magazine. Her articles have also appeared in such publications as, The San Francisco Chronicle, The St. Petersburg Times, The Writer and more. Her book reviews are regularly featured on The California Report, a news-magazine produced by NPR-affiliate KQED radio.

Visit her blog: www.jordanrosenfeld.wordpress.com