Any tips on how to create believable characters that readers can sympathise with? Do characters need to be very particular for them to become universal? How useful is psychology in creating characters? I'm beginning to think I need to start reading books on psychology - any recommendations? Do you have a point you wish to make with each character or do you allow them to develop freely? Thanks.

Sometimes characters are based on people I've met, other times I just know what sort of person I want the character to be.

One of the characters in a novel I've just started is a young girl just dropped out of Uni. She's very sassy and flirty. She messes men around and will think nothing of dropping one man if a better offer comes up for that evening.
She just sort of evolved really, so I suppose my characters come to me and I then expand on what sort of person they are going to be.

Sorry, not much help I'm afraid.

Kat

Hi Traveller

I usually base my characters on real people to start with and then extrapolate from there. In the past I have also written CV's for my characters so that they become real people. In the CVs I list hobbies, pet hates, favourite sayings just to get a feel for the character and more recently I have written poems from each character's perspective out of boredom but it helped me to sharpen their voices. I hope this helps. S

I've wondered about psychology textbooks too, but I think you risk ending up writing characters like case studies and all too like the little examples in pop psychology articles in a glossy mag: 'Linda was 27 when her husband left her. Ever since childhood she had...' (Don't get me wrong. I read that sort of thing avidly, but I don't want to write like it, and will abandon a novel that does).

We all instinctively know more about what makes people tick and why than we know we do (unless you're writing a psychopath, in which case maybe you have got some homework to do). The key is to access that knowledge. Reducing it very crudely I think you can start from the inside or the outside.

From the inside: what sort of person are they? What happened them in childhood/university/hospital? How do they feel about their crap job/beautiful face/impossible dog? Why? Did they get on better with their mother or their father in childhood? And now, and why did it change? How do they feel about sex? Why do certain things disgust them?

Or from the outside: remember that Beryl Reid always started from what shoes her character had? You can think up only the most basic of outlines - say 'flirty and young', as Kat says - but by the time you've decided what your person wears/says/drives/eats/reads, what makes them laugh, what disgusts them (or whatever you most need to know for the chapter you're writing), you'll find you really know quite a lot about them without having to go anywhere near a psychology textbook. Send them to an art gallery you know and see what they think. Plonk them in your childhood home and listen. Push them into a terrible situation and watch how they cope.

Of course, actually we all use both ways and some others, and in different proportions depending on how much we're seeing things from their PoV and how important they are. But if the illusion we all sign up to, that fiction creates a 'whole' person, makes you feel you must start inside, I'd say, have a think about how we get to know a new person in real life. By clothes, hair, accent, manner. It can be really helpful and less daunting to see your character as waiting for you to get to know them, rather than you creating them from scratch. And because you've grounded them in specifics, they're very alive and believable to the reader, even if the reader couldn't give you back a neatly dissected psychological profile suitable for a glossy mag's pop psychology article.

One other thought. In trying to make what your character does believable, it can really help to think in terms of 'intentions'. In Stanislavski's An Actor Prepares he has a central technique of deciding for every single speech what your character is trying to do by speaking it. After all, in real life you don't think 'I will now be angry with him' you think 'Bloody hell, he can't do that!'. Drama teachers make you pin it down as a verb: you don't say 'I'm angry' you say your intention is 'to terrify'. You don't think, 'I'm turned on' you think, 'to seduce'. That way you stop trying to play emotions, which is never convincing, and start doing real actions. Suddenly what happens is real. Mutatis mutandis it works for writing too. If you know what the characters' 'intentions' in doing/saying something are, then how they do/say it, and what happens next, will quite naturally be believable.

Some quick tricks:

Which of their senses are they most alive to?

Does their body language fit how they see themselves, or contradict it?

Are they the same to everyone, or do they change voice/behaviour/character according to who they're with? Consciously or unconsciously? And with men versus women? And do they change to match, or to be opposite?

If your inner voice says, 'she just wouldn't do that' then go with it, even if you have to re-jig the whole damn plot.

Emma

I've given some of my character's the flaws and quirks I've picked up on from people I love, hate or find particularly interesting. It doesnt even have to be someone I know, it could be anyone I've studied or read about. What type of people make you tick? What type of people piss you off? What is it about them that pissed you off? I read somewhere that everybody has a part in their mind that they dont want anyone else to see. It could hold your deep personal views on topics people are supposed to conform to, ideas or thoughts that seem crazy, random feelings that you wouldnt express aloud, memories whether wonderful or horrific that you never forgot about. Ask yourself what yours are.

have you ever looked at a piece of art and wondered what the artist was trying to say or what mood he/she must have been in.

Have you ever walked down the street and watched people's faces? they are all absorbed in their own thoughts and thinking about their own lives.

All these different things can evolve and shape a whole other person that perhaps you aspire or dread to be.

I've always believed that a character is someone a writer creates out of everything that fascinates them because otherwise you wouldnt give them the traits you do. Whether its hair colour, weight, a particular weakness, a fondness for something or someone, it all comes down to you. As somebody very talented on this site said to me, nobody can steal your unique way of thinking and everyone has their own.

So I dont think you'll find it in a psychology book, you'd have a better chance of finding this 'believeable character' in yourself.

Oh and I would say to let the story flow and as you say the character will develop freely in its own time, depending on events. This way, the quirks will just pop into your head when you least expect it.

For me, I find that my background in acting helps. It is very easy for me to visualise myself as someone else i.e a character I am writing about. Most of the time, I only have a rough idea of who they are when I start, and like real life, they become revealed as time progresses.

I'd stay away from psychology books, to be honest. It isn't important for a reader to know the technicalities of why someone acts this way or that by a precise science - only that you feel the character when you write it. Then the reader should feel it too.

JB

JB, I'd forgotten your acting background. Did you ever dip into Stanislavski (and I don't mean the Method, but the real thing)? I'm pretty sure that my drama degree has been more directly useful to me as a writer than an English degree would have been. (And my mother and one sister have English degrees, so I've a fair idea of what I would have been doing!)

Emma

No, Emma, I have to be honest and say that name doesn't ring a bell. Most of my acting was done as a kid, stage plays and a couple of TV ads in SA. I continued theatre studies at sixth form (mainly Greek mask work), and then went on to drama school...and then, nothing. I guess life got in the way. Doesn't it always? Writing (my first love) blossomed again almost as a form of 'inner acting'.

Indeed, I'm gladdened by what you say, because when I look at my life, from a child constructing stories with Star Wars figures, to treading the boards and now being a novelist, I have always been 'play acting' in one form or another.

For me, that's what writing is - my adult way of playing 'dress up' and getting away with it.

JB

Yes, when I'm beating myself up about how long it's taken to get where I am, I look back and realise that everything was actually adding up to being a writer. As a child I was mad about history, and as a teenager I got very stage-struck, (Oh, the pangs of adolescent love for Ian McKellen as Macbeth, even though I knew perfectly well he wouldn't have been interested) but I realise now that like you, both were the ways I had at the time of engaging with characters and events outside myself. I did a drama degree as a substitute for drama school, and it had the admirable effect of curing me completely.

But I do think writers could do a lot worse than read Stanislavski: An Actor Prepares is the basic one. He was director of the Moscow Art theatre, which premiéred all Chekov's plays, among others, and Gorky and the other early post-Revolution writers whose names I used to know.

Emma

Thanks guys, very helpful advice. I have been told, in relation to my first novel which is being rejected by publishers across the board, I have a tendency to create characters that are stereotypes: 'I felt that [Traveller] had a tendency to use his characters as mouthpieces for issues or ideals, which prevented them from being fully-rounded and sympathetic.' And I'm beginning to think that herein lies the problem with my novel. I don't entirely agree with the comment as I've tried to add layers to my characters, so that the knife-wielding skinhead has a sensitive side and his mother, a heroin addict, has a likeable aspect to her personality. But now I'm thinking, in a satirical novel, isn't it natural to portray characters as mouthpieces for issues or ideals? Can characters be truly fully-rounded in a satire? Hmm, sorry I'm thinking out loud now. Thanks again for your kind input and ideas.

Heck, it's a fascinating subject. My first novel is told entirely in first person narrative (no mean feat for a preppy, I'll tell ya) and I employed method acting techniques to 'become' my MC. Partly, he is me. I was utterly heartbroken at the time, and the shift in my writing to dark fantasy is indicative of the fact that I'm not any more. Put simply, I could not write the same book now, but I think it was that horrid experience and the 'acting' that got me published.

So...Emma, do you think Sir McKellan wouldn't be interested...or Macbeth? Neither would make very good love choices, agreed

JB

Traveller, I think there are two different risks going on here. One is simple stereotyping - that a Welsh person is musical, that a drug dealer is callous - and if you're going to make those people like that, then you have to make very sure that you've imagined out exactly how they are like that to the fullest extent, so that we really believe in them as individuals. Sure, give the drug dealer a softer side, or the Welsh person a phobia about piano music, but the softer side and the callous side (or the passion and the phobia) have to be two of many facets of the whole person, manifesting themselves in ways that make sense. It's not enough to have him stepping over the corpse of a victim in one scene and going home to his dear old mum in the next. We have to feel the connection.

The risk with satirical characters is that since we already half-recognise the type, there's nothing there to surprise or engage us. They may embody ideas, but for us to bother with them they have embody some of the rest of being human as well. I don't think characters need to be fully-rounded, but I do think they need to be three-quarters-rounded. In which case, the satire has got to start from something we know - yuppie bankers at play, say - but then you have to imagine each banker out further than we could possibly take it, with the kind of lovingly evoked - and probably slightly over-the-top-for-comic-effect - detail of every aspect of their humanness that makes them compellingly believable even as we half-know that even yuppie bankers aren't quite as appalling as that in real life.

Emma

Emma

<Added>

JB, McKellen wouldn't be, but I don't know about Macbeth; he was pretty involved with his wife at the time, and she had a bit of a thing for knives, so it might not have be wise to have tried my chances.

The Macbeth character in the recent Shakespeare Retold series was pretty gorgeous too.

Emma

Traveller, I think what I'm really saying is that stereotyping and satire are both potentially reductive, and so you need to try extra hard to counteract that by expanding the characters into the fullness that we expect in more subtly-drawn fiction. If you look at successful charicatures, they're extraordinarily detailed, and the devilish humour's in the detail.

Hi Emma. Yes, a lot of what you say makes sense. Because we are familiar with a certain type of character, we need to hear something new or unexpected that gives us another angle on that certain 'type'; and I can see how in a satire this would be required even more so. I've learnt a lot from this - I think for my next novel, I'm going to do it in this order 1. Idea/conception 2. Characters 3. Plot rather than 1. Idea/conception 2. Plot 3. Characters. Of course as with all writing, there is no secret magic formula!

<Added>

I take the point about needing to see the connection between the good and bad sides - for example, I give my racist skinhead character a sensitive side by making him a skilful guitarist. But I didn't really think much about this connection and in fact based it on someone I used to know (!). But isn't this where the psychology books come in useful? For example, I recently read an article on how Dostoevsky's characters were psychologically accurate - in the way he portrayed Raskolnikov (sp?) have a dream about a horse getting beaten paralleling later events in the story - and his portrayal of epilepsy in his characters etc. I can imagine how psychological theory can create more realistic match-ups between (to put it simplistically) 'good' and 'bad' sides. I guess the portrayal of internal and external facets of a character's persona is another way of putting it.