Developing Personality

A character's personality is something that develops over the course of the writing process. It's a lot like getting to know another person - it's impossible to know a whole lot about them before you've seen them in a variety of situations. In the prewriting stage, don't worry about brainstorming a full-fledged character; just stick with the basics we discussed two weeks ago - the immediate backstory and the important details of the characters' relationships with each other. Your chief concern is getting the story finished, even if it sucks.

Because it will suck, and it will most likely be due to your characters. That's where revision comes in. Your second and third drafts (and beyond) are where you start fixing things, including the focus of this week's talk: personality.

Do you have your character sketches handy? Get those out. If you had any ideas during the writing, add those if you haven't already. You should have a rough idea of what the character is like - adjectives like "angry" or "melancholy" should give you a basic filter through which all other details should pass. The next step is to take the information in your character sketch and ask, "How does this interact with the character's personality?"

Let's take a look. Suppose your character sheet tells you that your main character is bald. If he is fundamentally insecure, then he'll probably wear a hat and become defensive if attention is drawn to his head. If he's more secure, he may think he looks like a badass and try to act tough. Of course, it could be an interesting twist for a guy who is insecure about something else to think his baldness makes him look scary, so don't rule anything out without giving it real consideration.

Another thing to keep in mind are your character's hobbies, as they can be quite revealing. Think about the differences between things like collecting stamps and fixing old cars. What is it about your character that makes one hobby preferable to another? Does he have exceptional patience? Is he organized or disorganized? Is he creative or destructive? Try and imagine your character involved in different activities and see how it unfolds.

Finally, think about personality quirks - little things that bring a character to life. These can be anything from fear of clowns to obsession with the freshness of fruit. Work these idiosyncrasies into the story; the characters will be far more interesting with them than without them.

Challenge: Take a character you are working on and put them in a variety of challening situations (traffic jam, power outage, in line behind a screaming kid at the grocery store, for example) to see how he or she will react.