Guest Author - Melissa Weise

Characters are what readers remember about stories. You may have worked hard to craft the most brilliant description of a sunset that has ever been written and your reader will most likely have enjoyed reading it, but what your readers are really looking for in a story are characters that they can connect with. Characters not only populate your story, they drive it and are doing all the actions that propel the plot forward. So if they are unbelievable, flat or boring your story will be too.

Believability does not mean that they cannot be fantastic; it just means that they have to be believably fantastic. You can still have supervillains, talking rabbits, and telepaths. You just have to make sure that you have set up your story so that the supervillain has a reason to be so bad, the talking rabbit makes sense in the context of the story and the telepath consistently operates as a telepath. In other words, to make sure that characters are believable, you have to have three concepts in place:

1) History, motivation or back story
2) Context
3) Consistency

These three concepts are necessary with any character and can be applied with some careful preparation and thought. First, you need to decide what your character will be like. Of course he or she needs a name, a species, a gender. All the basic demographic information that you fill out on a job application or college resume. That’s the easy part and this is where many writers stop. Don’t. This is just the beginning.

What you need to think about now is your character’s backstory. Where did he or she grow up? What was his or her relationship with his parents like? Did he or she suffer any terrible tragedies in his or her life? When was his or her first kiss? What is your character most afraid of? Proud of? In another words, what would your character be talking to a therapist about if he or she were going to counseling? This will give your character motivation and a reason to do what he or she does.

By the time you have finished with this step, you should know quite a bit about your character. Sometimes funny things can happen when you learn this much about your character, though so don’t be surprised if you discover that your character is nothing like you thought he or she was or that he or she actually belongs in another setting or another story altogether. That’s okay. You need to be flexible with characters and give them room to grow and evolve and write your story around them sometimes. This is where context comes into place. If you have discovered that your supervillain is terrified of the water, you certainly can’t have him or her living in a submarine (at least not without interesting ramifications). Likewise, if you have learned that your bunny can talk in an Irish brogue, your story will probably not be set in a dramatic criminal investigations unit in New York City. At least not without some really good explanation.

Finally, as you are writing your now fleshed-out and interesting character moving around in his or her setting, make sure that you are consistent. Making characters do things out of the ordinary without explanation turns readers off. Your talking rabbit becoming mute or your water phobic supervillain being an expert high diver defies not only logic but consistency and will frustrate your reader. That is not to say that your characters can’t change, evolve and grow. But show this happening. Perhaps the bunny has laryngitis or your supervillain went through hypnotherapy. These explanations provide consistency and ultimately believability. And this will keep your readers reading which is what we all want.