There are a plethora of online tools and printable character sheets that leave space for you to list dozens of details about your main characters. By the time you finish one of those, you’ll know more about them than you do about yourself.
But so often, I’ve seen writers get caught up in the minute details of a main character while neglecting the key aspects of their personality. The result is a character who is nothing more than a hollow shell instead of a beautiful candy-coated treat to read, and you don’t want to see a hollow shell become a melty mess when the plot turns up the heat!
If you want to craft characters that can withstand the pressure of your narrative and the bend of a character arc, then you need to know these seven things about your main character.
1. The Direction of Your Character’s Arc
Not every character should have a life-changing epiphany and get a happily ever after. If that were true, we’d be seriously limited in the number of stories we could tell! Consider whether your main character—and every character with a name, come to think of it—should suffer a downfall (like Oedipus), change for the better (like Disney’s Mulan) or stay static (like Sherlock Holmes), and go from there.
For further reading about character arcs, check out this blog post.
2. What They Look Like
If you’re like me—someone who has a poor memory and hates writing description—then illustrating with words what a character looks like is the bane of your existence. Still, you have to paint that picture sooner or later.
What helps me is choosing a celebrity (or, far more often, the stock photo used for the cover), and let those physical traits inspire my descriptions. It’s far easier to have an unchanging visual aid you can reference while you write than to try to remember whether Johnny’s eyes are bottle green or baby blue.
Know what they look like, but not what to call them? Read this!
3. Why They Do What They Do
You want your main character to make sense. To paraphrase a famous quote, having a character stand for nothing will make them fall for anything the plot has in store. They’ll be pulled through the story instead of pushing through it against all odds.
What compels your character? What keeps them up at night? What horrible thing happened to them in their past that makes them so steely-eyed in pursuit of what they want?
4. What They’re Afraid Of
Again, this will be tied to something that happened long ago (or not that long ago, but almost definitely off-page). When the “carrot” of what your character wants doesn’t feel weighty enough, you need the “stick” of what they fear to get them taking another step towards their climax.
And, of course, you’re probably going to have your main character confront this fear at some point in your story for maximum conflict!
5. How They Relate to Their World
Are they outgoing or introverted? Optimistic or cynical? Beloved or misunderstood? How a character relates to the world they come from will absolutely affect how they act there and how they react when they encounter unfamiliar territory.
It takes a village to raise a child, we’ve all heard. So what was your main character’s village like? Or, if they didn’t have one, how did that affect them?
6. What They Want Most
As I’ve previously hinted at throughout this blog post, no matter whether they have a positive, negative, or neutral arc, your main character is chasing something—to keep their identity a secret, to win their parents’ approval, the solution to a mystery, or something. And they want it desperately.
This part is important: even if they can’t put it into words, you should, even if it’s just a note to yourself, and you only hint at it for the reader without stating it outright.
7. What They Actually Need
This is the secret ingredient that takes stories from good to great. Just like in real life, what we want is rarely the thing that we actually need to be happy.
If your main character is chasing their parents’ approval, what they probably actually need is self-acceptance.
If you’ve got a main character who is trying to conceal their identity, the cat has to be let out of the bag sometime.
And the main character who’s solving a mystery has been putting the clues together all wrong. They’re looking at things from the wrong perspective, or missing a key fact.
Now, the question is, will they realize it in time?
