I love reading strong characters, and I love creating them even more!
A lot of advice on how to create strong characters tends to start with a character questionnaire. (Here’s an example if you’re curious.)
While these questionnaires have some great things to consider, they never helped me to create strong characters.
I always felt like it was a little too much too fast. I used to be overwhelmed by the sheer number of things to consider. So much so that I would try to power through these question without really digging in and getting to know my characters like I needed to.
So instead, I created some questions of my own.
How to Create Strong Characters: 3 Writing Tips
I developed this process pretty organically. I learned what I needed to get excited about my characters and truly bring them to life.
Now it’s what I use as the basis for ALL of my major characters. I’ve never seen anything that looks like my initial approach online, which is why I’m sharing it with you!
Here are the three big areas I think about any time I want to create strong characters:
What happened to your character before your book starts?
When I first come up with an idea, I tend to have some loose details of what happened to my characters before my book starts.
Before I do anything else, I take the time to really develop these events. Most importantly, I want to know what happened in my character’s past that defined them. What shaped them into the person they are at the start of the book?
For example, when I started planning the Raven Files, I knew it was going to be a book about a girl who was kidnapped by an enemy spy agency when she was eight.
I also knew she would be eighteen when the book starts. So before I started writing I sat down and thought about what it would be like for my character to be taken from her parents so young, what her training was like, what her life was like at this enemy spy agency, and what some of her defining missions were.
All of this not only gave me a seriously strong sense of my character, but it also got me really excited to think about the story I was planning to tell.
Who is your character at the start of the book?
Now that you know what shaped your character’s past, it’s time to think about how those events truly impacted them and made them into the character that they are at the start of your story.
Did events of the past traumatize them? Or do they find themselves anxious in certain situations because of something that happened to them? Are they super confident in one area of their life for a specific reason?
Go through your character’s history and ask yourself how affected your character would be by each of their key life events that happened prior to the start of the book. Then ask yourself how your character deals with or shows that impact.
Every single event may not have a lasting effect, but finding the ones that do can be key in understanding who your character is at the start of your story.
Once you know who they are, you can figure out how they develop.
Who do you want your character to be by the end of the book?
I also like to think of this question as, “what should my character to learn by the end?”
The idea is, once you know what you want your character to learn or who you want them to be, you’ll be able to develop a reasonable path to help get them there.
For instance, in the first book of the Raven Files, I knew my main character came from a traumatic environment. She was raised to trust no one and fight for her life on a daily basis.
The biggest thing I wanted her to learn by the end of the book was how to trust other people and let other people help her. With that in mind, I was able to plot out a variety of situations where she would first be forced to rely on other people and trust them. Then as we get deeper into the book, she could begin to make the choice to trust them.
Knowing where I wanted my character to end up made plotting believable development so much easier than it would have been had I not known where I wanted my character to grow by the end.
BONUS TIP
If you really want to dig deep, consider getting out of your head pulling a Tarot card to help you answer each of these questions. You can pull the card from the start. Or take some time to unpack these questions on their own, then pull a card to go deeper.
Tarot doesn’t have to be super woo. It isn’t about telling you your future or dictating your fate. It’s about connecting you to your intuition and inner wisdom.
The cards all have a general enough meaning that you can apply them to any situation in your life or your story. It’s about looking at images in the card and the general meanings. Then you see what speaks to you and allow your intuition tell you how to best apply the card to your book.
The quality of reading you get comes down to the question you ask. The only thing you have to buy into is the the cards that come out are the ones that have a message for you.
Asking the cards the questions in the post can deepen your understanding of your characters and inspire you.
If you ask the first question, “what happened to my character before the start of the book?” Then pull two cards: the Ten of Pentacles and the Page of Wands reversed.
This might indicate that your character came from a very wealthy family and had a lot of their passions and creative ambitions squashed throughout their childhood.
This might then spark a lot of inspiration about their family, passions, interests, and history before we meet them on the page.
If you want to try this for yourself but don’t have a deck, you can use this random card generator. Just ask it to generate 1 or 2 cards instead of 5. Then you can use this website to look up your card’s possible meanings and decide what feels right for your story.
And if you’re looking for some guidance in using Tarot to support your book or yourself, I can help! I’m a certified Transformational Tarot coach, and I’m well versed in creating readings to help you get the most out of your project and your writing life. Learn more about readings. Or learn more about coaching.
I hope this helps you create strong characters!
I kickstart all of my characters by figuring out these three big questions. I’ve found it not only helps me develop my characters, but it also makes me really eager to write. I hope this helps you as much as it helps me!
Now it’s your turn: What approach do you take when you’re trying to create strong characters? What big questions to do you ask that you’ve found to be really helpful? Let me know in the comments below.
Meghan, this is so cool! Although I don’t exactly ask these three questions, an equivalent process that seems to be organic and intrinsic to me takes place when I work with a character. It’s hard to explain it, but essentially my best stories seem to come from dreams that won’t leave my mind when I wake up. The characters are already there, being birthed full grown like Athena from Zeus’ head. I already *KNOW* their backstories; who they were in the past, how they got be be who and where they are, and where they need to go and grow by the end of the story. I guess I’ve been doing this literally in my sleep for years. It’s so cool to see the process validated!
Wow, that’s pretty cool that your subconscious does all that work for you! I almost never remember my dreams but I wish I did for reasons just like this one. I’m glad this post could help validate your approach! Keep doing what you’re doing! 😀
Although I’m more into songwriting than story writing (in some ways, sometimes they can be the same thing) I take a very detailed approach to characters — often even creating a whole world for them that the listener will never get to really see, before I start writing the single moment of their life that you will hear.
I really like to think of working with characters as working with a wild animal. You have somewhere you want them to go but they’ve got their own ideas. You can’t stop them from going where they want to but you can sometimes nudge them in the right direction. And sometimes you need to compromise with them to keep your work believable and true to yourself. So the most important thing I think to have in mind working with characters is not to be afraid to second guess your initial plans for them.
I think this is a really great perspective! It’s easy to get locked into your first ideas for your characters, but they can absolutely evolve as you get to know them better. Thanks for sharing this!