How to Write Characters, Not Puppets

Less string-pulling, more rounded characters

It’s time to talk about characters! You can have the best plot in the world teamed with the most beautiful writing, but if your characters feel like cardboard cut-outs walking through the story then your book will still fall flat.

What we’re aiming for is characters who feel like real people – so much so that as you are writing you know when something is out of character for them, or find that they somehow won’t quite do what you want them to do, and instead say or do something completely different. If your characters act only to serve the plot – that is they do exactly what you want and need them to do to make the story you want, like a puppet you’re controlling – then they are never going to feel like rounded, three-dimensional people. They will feel like a plot device in a hat.

There is lots of character-development advice out there, and it tends to sit in one of two camps. Either you’re advised to think about the overall character arc – what the character wants and needs – or to think about specific details – whether they are the kind of person who pays cash or card, or how they respond to someone cutting them up in the car.

Photo by Nik on Unsplash

These are both good routes, and both big-picture motivations and little details are things you’ll likely know about your characters by the time they’re fully developed (that said, personally I find thinking about the little details of how characters act before you know anything else about them slightly backwards, since it’s the bigger picture things that will lead to the smaller details, but your mileage may vary). But I think what character-development advice is often missing is to explain when and why these things matter – and what I mean here is that sometimes they don’t.

Obviously it probably doesn’t matter whether your character pays with cash or card (unless they suddenly need to go on the run and only have a very trackable credit card with them). But it also doesn’t necessarily matter what your character’s goal is – unless you make it matter. If your character longs to get justice for some wrong, but it doesn’t impact any of the decisions they make along the way, then it doesn’t matter. For your main character this is unlikely – your plot is (hopefully!) about them working to get to their goal (though I’ve definitely read numerous manuscripts which are just a series of events happening to the main character). But even your secondary characters will want things, and those won’t necessarily be the main goal of the plot – but they should still change how that character behaves.

As I say, there are many, many things you might know about your characters. Many of those do not matter to the plot and so don’t matter to your readers – and so they needn’t be in the book. But there are four big questions that I think really do matter, and those are the questions I would always think about when developing characters.

What do they want?

Perhaps your character has political ambitions. At present they’re an accountant, but they are already networking their way through their local party and setting themselves up as a future candidate.

So what? What might that mean about them and the way they act? How might it change how they navigate the world of your story?

Maybe it means they avoid anything which might bring their name into disrepute more assiduously than otherwise. Say their best friend is accused of a crime – perhaps rather than believe in and support their friend, they’ll drop them so they don’t risk being a known associate of someone with a blotted record. Maybe it means they insert themselves into situations they shouldn’t, trying to show their ability to resolve issues or to take charge of things. Maybe they have connections who can help get them or their family out of sticky moments, and so protect themselves at others’ cost.

Again, none of this matters if these moments aren’t relevant to the plot; you don’t want to write in a new plotline just to show how your would-be politician would deal with it. What you want to do is think about how their motivation or goal will change the way they act through your story – or perhaps what kind of motivation or goal will help them act in a way which will help move your story along.

Where have they been?

Something I see a lot when editing is authors using backstory as character development. They’ll tell me a character’s history – their troubled childhood, their time in the army, their broken marriage – and assume that that makes for a fully developed character. But we’re missing that link between backstory and current plot: why does it matter? If their childhood was difficult but it makes absolutely no difference to the story I’m reading, how has that helped develop their character?

Everyone has a history, and there are myriad ways the places we’ve been, the circumstances we’ve found ourselves in and the situations we’ve dealt with change who we are and how we respond to things. If your character has a cheating ex-spouse in their past, perhaps they’ll be quick to jump to the conclusion that someone else is lying to them, and act on that without considering that they might have made a mistake. Perhaps their recent divorce means they work long hours, not wanting to go home to an empty house, and become obsessed with their current project/case/hobby, which is the focus of the plot.

So we don’t want to be told the characters’ backstories; we want to see them woven into the characters’ presents. We want to see how those backstories change the ways they behave and react, and how they change the story too. Your character was bullied at school for a terrible performance at debate class, so now they avoid any public speaking, which means their junior colleague has to give a presentation instead of them, so their junior gets the attention of the senior partners/attractive colleague your character desires and so on and so on. Or your character was bullied at school and so has a strong reaction to seeing someone else being bullied/being a bully and does X, Y and Z to resolve it – or they are so triggered that they ignore the situation entirely, allowing it to escalate. Your character being bullied as a child means something to them: it doesn’t exist in a bubble. If the impact of that bullying is just the knowledge that they were bullied, your character is no more developed than they were before we knew that.

How do they talk?

This is my favourite character development tip, because it’s one that feels invisible when it’s woven in well, but has a huge impact on the power of your story:

Your characters shouldn’t all speak the same.

I don’t just mean accents, but those obviously matter too – I mean the words and phrases we choose to use. Everyone will have their own idiosyncratic language choices, which make us sound like us. We might use lots of contractions (don’t, haven’t) or say each word fully. We might use slang or regional terms, which might give away where we’re from, or our social class. We might favour constructions like ‘I see what you mean’ over those like ‘that rings a bell’, suggesting how we like to take in information, by seeing or hearing it. We might know lots of technical terms about certain subjects, or use long, complex sentences – or the opposite, and use simple vocab and grammar.

All of that can tell us huge amounts of information about who we are and how we process things. The way that you explain something or tell a story will be distinct from the way I might do so. Your characters should be the same.

But this might change, too! The way your character speaks at work to their superiors will be different to the way they speak to their mates. The way they speak when tired, or angry, or sad, or nervous, will be different to the way they speak when happy, calm and rested. And perhaps there are tells when they are lying or bluffing, certain phrases that give them away.

Like I say, this is pretty invisible when done well (i.e. more subtler than suggestin’ a regional accent wiv lots of spellin’ mistakes an’ apostrophes, which can make things hard to read), but the impact on how readers understand your characters – and how developed said characters feel – is huge.

How do they change?

Lastly, how do your characters change through the book? Again, with your main character it’s unlikely they won’t change: the story will be about them trying to do something and either succeeding or failing, though it won’t necessarily be a tangible thing. But again you can think about how what happens to them, and how they react to it, changes them – and then how that goes on to change the plot.

If they start the book too afraid to do something they long to, but then find the courage – what happens next? Are they rewarded for their new-found bravery, or does something go terribly wrong? Perhaps they need to reach for their courage again, or perhaps they decide once bitten is twice shy and give up (or find a new goal).

With your secondary characters you don’t necessarily have as much space to show how they change – and of course the focus of your plot is by definition on your main character. But for those particularly close to your main character, or particularly entwined in the main plot – or particularly affected by it – perhaps there are ways they’ll change too.

This is really another way of raising the stakes. If no one is changed by what happens, what does it matter? But if everything that happens is driven by your characters, impacts your characters, and changes your characters, your story will be much more powerful.

Writing characters is difficult, I know. You might find that at first – perhaps even for the whole of the first draft – you are pulling the strings, moving the characters around like chess pieces. But if you keep asking yourself the questions above, keep thinking about what your characters want, what they’ll do to get it, how they might behave to make that happen, they will slowly but surely start to come to life. And then they might just surprise you by doing whatever they feel like rather than what you tell them to!

I had a flurry of new subscribers last week, and I’m thrilled to have you all here! Please join me in the comments to share your best character-development tips, or tell me what you’re struggling with and I’ll try to help. And please do let me know what you’d like to see me write about – I am always open to suggestions and I want this to be as helpful as possible!

Happy writing,

Abi