When readers dive into a story, it’s not just the plot twists or vivid settings that keep them hooked—it’s the characters. Great characters breathe life into your novel, transforming words on a page into a world your readers can feel and relate to.
They’re the flawed heroes we cheer for, the complex villains we can’t help but understand, and the supporting cast that enriches the tapestry of your tale.
But creating characters that linger in a reader’s mind long after they close the book? That’s no easy feat. It takes more than a clever backstory or a snappy one-liner. Writing great characters requires authenticity, depth, and a keen understanding of human nature.
Why Great Characters are important
Great characters are the foundation of any memorable story. They bring the plot to life, connect with readers on a personal level, and make the narrative unforgettable. Without compelling characters, your story loses its heart and impact.
They drive the story forward: Characters drive your story forward by making decisions, facing challenges, and taking actions that shape the plot. Their goals, conflicts, and growth create momentum, turning events into meaningful progression. Without active characters, your story stalls; their choices and reactions are what transform a series of events into a compelling narrative.
They create an emotional connection: Characters create emotional connections by giving your readers someone to relate to, root for, or even challenge. Their vulnerabilities, struggles, and triumphs mirror real human experiences, allowing your readers to empathize and invest in their journey
They make stories memorable: Characters make stories memorable by leaving a lasting emotional impact. They connect with your readers in a way that lingers long after your story ends. A well-crafted character transforms a narrative into an experience that readers carry with them.
They fuel conflict and tension: Characters fuel conflict and tension by bringing their own desires, fears, and flaws into the story. Their goals often clash with those of other characters, creating friction that propels the narrative. Internal struggles and tough decisions add layers of tension.
The Different Roles of Your Characters
Every character in a story serves a purpose, from the hero driving the narrative to the antagonist creating conflict, and the supporting cast adding depth and dimension.
Understanding these roles is essential for building a well-rounded story where each character contributes meaningfully to the plot and themes.
The Protagonist
The Role: The central character through whom your story unfolds.
Description:
Your protagonist drives the narrative by pursuing a specific goal or desire, facing challenges, and undergoing growth. They are the character readers connect with most deeply, experiencing their struggles, triumphs, and emotions. Your protagonist’s journey forms the backbone of the story, and their choices directly shape the plot. A strong protagonist must be compelling, even if flawed, as their personal growth often mirrors your story’s themes.
Traits:
- Clear goals and motivations.
- Relatable flaws or vulnerabilities.
- Active decision-making and problem-solving.
- Undergoes a meaningful character arc.
The Antagonist
The Role: The primary source of conflict, opposing your protagonist’s goals.
Description:
The antagonist challenges your protagonist, creating obstacles and tension that drive your story forward. They are not always a villain; an antagonist can be any character, force, or circumstance that opposes your protagonist’s desires. A well-crafted antagonist is multidimensional, with clear motivations that make their opposition feel justified or understandable. Their role is essential for creating stakes and pushing your protagonist to grow or change.
Traits:
- Strong motivations that clash with the protagonist.
- Capable of challenging or outsmarting the protagonist.
- Complexity and depth beyond being “evil.”
- A direct or indirect influence on the protagonist’s growth.
The Supporting Characters
The Role: Characters who enhance your story by aiding or challenging your protagonist.
Description:
Supporting characters enrich the narrative by providing additional perspectives, aiding your protagonist, or adding complexity to the plot. They can include allies, mentors, love interests, rivals, or foils. These characters often help reveal different facets of your protagonist’s personality or provide crucial assistance during key moments. While they may not have the depth of the protagonist or antagonist, supporting characters should feel real and purposeful, contributing to the story’s world and themes.
Traits:
- Distinct personalities and roles.
- Clear relationships to the protagonist or antagonist.
- Skills, flaws, or insights that impact the plot.
- Limited but meaningful character development.
Background Characters
The Role: Minor characters who add realism and texture to your story’s world.
Description:
Background characters, such as shopkeepers, passersby, or minor officials, make the world feel alive and dynamic. Though they do not play major roles, they provide context and depth to the setting, making it believable. While their presence is often subtle, well-crafted background characters can indirectly influence your protagonist’s journey or highlight key aspects of your story. They ensure the world doesn’t feel empty or disconnected.
Traits:
- Defined by a single role or purpose.
- Simple, believable personalities.
- Serve to enhance the setting or advance the plot in small ways.
- Avoid becoming overly detailed or distracting.
Writing Relatable Characters
Relatable characters are the key to capturing your readers’ hearts. They don’t need to be perfect or even likable—they just need to feel real. When readers see pieces of themselves in your characters, they form a deeper connection to the story.
Crafting relatable characters is about balancing flaws and strengths, giving them authentic emotions, and placing them in situations where they must make believable choices.
Understand What Makes a Character Relatable
Relatable characters reflect universal emotions and struggles, blending unique traits with familiar experiences. Your readers connect through shared feelings like fear or ambition, making your characters feel authentic and engaging.
Give Them Clear Goals and Motivations
Characters with clear goals and motivations drive the plot. Their desires and struggles must feel purposeful, giving your readers a reason to invest in their journey.
Showcase Their Flaws and Vulnerabilities
Flaws and vulnerabilities make your characters human. Imperfections, like self-doubt or fear, create depth and relatability, allowing your readers to empathize and connect more deeply with their story.
Make Their Decisions Feel Authentic
Authentic decisions align with a character’s personality, values, and situation. When choices feel real, your readers understand and connect with the character’s journey, making your story more believable and compelling.
Make Your Characters Believable
Believable characters act consistently within their world, reflecting authentic emotions and behavior. This realism grounds your story and deepens your readers’ emotional investment.
Use Relationships to Reveal Their Humanity
Relationships reveal your characters’ humanity through connections, conflict, and growth. Interactions with others expose vulnerabilities and emotional depth.
Character Arcs
A great character arc shows growth, change, or transformation, making your story feel dynamic and meaningful. It’s how characters evolve through challenges and conflicts, resonating with readers on an emotional level. Crafting strong arcs means creating authentic journeys that align with your story’s themes.
- Understand the Purpose of a Character Arc: A character arc adds depth and meaning to your story by showing growth or change.
- Identify the Starting Point: Who Are They Now?: Your character’s starting point defines their flaws, beliefs, and motivations.
- Define Their End Point: Who Will They Become?: Determine how your character evolves by the story’s conclusion. Their end point should reflect the lessons they’ve learned and align with the story’s core message.
- Create a Clear Goal or Desire: A compelling arc begins with your character’s goal or desire. This drives their actions, shapes the plot, and creates emotional stakes.
- Introduce Challenges That Force Growth: Challenges and conflicts are the catalysts for transformation. By facing obstacles, your character learns, adapts, or changes, making their growth feel earned and impactful.
- Ensure the Arc Feels Earned: Authentic arcs unfold gradually through actions and experiences. Avoid sudden changes; instead, build transformation step by step to ensure your character’s journey feels believable and satisfying.
Character Motivation
Motivation gives your characters purpose, shaping their actions and decisions. Without it, stories feel aimless and characters lack depth. Let’s go through a few things you should consider when working with character motivation.
Avoid Weak or Generic Motivations
Vague motivations feel hollow and unconvincing. The stronger and more personal the motivation, the more compelling the character’s journey, making their choices feel authentic and emotionally engaging.
Different Types of Character Motivations
Motivation can take many forms, depending on the character and your story’s themes. Some of the most common types include:
- Survival and Self-Preservation: The most basic human instinct, driving characters to fight for their lives or escape danger.
- Love, Connection, and Belonging: Seeking family, friendship, or romance to fill an emotional void.
- Revenge, Justice, and Redemption: A powerful motivator for characters who seek to right past wrongs.
- Power, Ambition, and Success: The drive for control, wealth, or personal achievement, often leading to moral dilemmas.
- Curiosity and Discovery: The pursuit of knowledge or truth, often found in adventurers, scientists, or detectives.
- Freedom and Independence: A need to break free from oppression, a controlling force, or their own fears.
- Sacrifice and Duty: Acting out of responsibility or loyalty, even at great personal cost.
Each type of motivation shapes the character’s decisions, interactions, and conflicts.
Use Conflicting Internal Motivations
Conflicting motivations—duty vs. love, revenge vs. morality—create tension, forcing difficult choices that define a character’s growth. Real people struggle with opposing desires, and characters should too. These inner conflicts make them more relatable and unpredictable.
How Motivations Drive External Conflict
When two characters have opposing goals, tension rises—one person’s success may mean another’s failure. A thief motivated by desperation clashes with a law-abiding detective seeking justice.
Even allies can experience tension when their personal needs and beliefs come into conflict, creating richer, more dynamic storytelling.
Using Stereotypes / Archetypes the Right Way
Stereotypes and archetypes are often seen as pitfalls in character writing, but they can actually be valuable tools when used correctly.
Archetypes—such as the hero, mentor, or trickster—provide a solid foundation for building characters with recognizable roles that resonate with readers. They help establish character dynamics quickly, especially in genres with well-known conventions like fantasy, mystery, or romance.
Even stereotypes, when approached with awareness, can serve as a familiar entry point for character development.
Stereotypes and archetypes aren’t inherently bad—they exist because they reflect patterns of human behavior and storytelling traditions. Many of the most memorable characters in literature and film started as archetypes but were deepened with unique personalities, flaws, and motivations.
For instance, Sherlock Holmes is an archetypal “brilliant detective,” yet his arrogance, loneliness, and obsessive tendencies make him far more than just a cliché. The key is not avoiding archetypes altogether but ensuring that your characters grow beyond them.
However, over-relying on stereotypes can lead to shallow, predictable, or even offensive characters. If a character is nothing more than a familiar trope—the damsel in distress, the wise old mentor, the villain who is evil for no reason—readers will find them forgettable.
Instead of blindly following familiar molds, writers should add depth by challenging expectations, subverting tropes, or adding unique backstories that justify the character’s traits.
Do:
- Use Archetypes as a Starting Point: Let them guide your initial concept, then develop details that make the character unique.
- Mix Multiple Archetypes: Combine elements from different character types to avoid predictability.
- Consider Reader Expectations: Understand when an audience might expect an archetype and how to keep it fresh.
Don’t:
- Rely Solely on Clichés: If your character can be summed up in one overused phrase, they need more depth.
- Let Archetypes Oversimplify Relationships: Not every mentor is wise, not every love interest is pure-hearted.
- Ignore Individuality: Even if a character follows an archetype, they should feel like a distinct, living person with unique emotions and perspectives.
By treating archetypes as flexible templates rather than rigid molds, writers can craft compelling, dynamic characters that feel both familiar and fresh. Stereotypes only become a problem when they limit creativity rather than enhance storytelling.
The best characters often start from something recognizable but evolve into something entirely their own.
Backstory
A strong backstory adds depth to a character, shaping their motivations, fears, and decisions. It explains why they act the way they do and helps readers connect with them on a deeper level.
However, backstory should serve the present story, not overshadow it. Dumping too much backstory too soon—especially through exposition—can slow down the narrative and overwhelm your readers.
Instead, weave it in naturally, revealing details through actions, dialogue, and subtle hints.
Too much backstory becomes a problem when it doesn’t serve the plot or character arc. If the story halts to provide pages of past events, the momentum suffers.
Focus on what’s relevant to your character’s journey—only share details that shape their current motivations, struggles, or relationships. A good rule of thumb: if the reader doesn’t need the information at that moment, save it for later (or maybe cut it altogether).
If a character’s past isn’t relevant to the plot or their arc, overloading backstory can slow the narrative and distract from the main story. Sometimes, a sense of mystery or an implied history is more effective than spelling everything out. A great character doesn’t need a detailed past—what matters most is who they are in your story – in the here and now.
Do:
- Make It Relevant: Tie backstory directly to the character’s motivations or conflicts in the present.
- Keep Some Mystery: Let readers discover elements of a character’s past over time rather than revealing everything at once.
- Reveal Backstory Through Different Perspectives: Other characters might have their own take on past events, creating intrigue and conflict.
Don’t:
- Use Flashbacks Excessively: Too many flashbacks disrupt pacing; use them sparingly and only when necessary – if at all.
- Explain Everything: Leave room for interpretation; readers don’t need to know every tiny detail about a character’s past.
- Ignore the Present Story: The backstory should enhance the current narrative, not take the focus away from it.
By striking the right balance, backstory can add richness to your characters without dragging the story down. When done well, it provides emotional depth, strengthens motivations, and keeps readers engaged in both the past and present journey of your characters.
Show, Don’t Tell
Your character’s traits, strengths, and weaknesses should be revealed through their actions, choices, and dialogue—not just stated outright. Simply telling the reader that a character is brave, intelligent, or stubborn doesn’t make them feel real.
Let their behavior speak for itself. If a character is brave, show them standing their ground in a tough situation. If they’re resourceful, have them find a clever solution when faced with a problem. These moments allow your readers to experience your character’s personality firsthand.
Telling weakens the reader’s connection because it forces them to accept information at face value. By allowing your readers to observe and interpret a character’s traits, you create a deeper emotional impact and make your character’s strengths and flaws feel organic and authentic.
Human Nature and Psychology
Understanding human nature and psychology is essential for creating characters that feel authentic and emotionally compelling.
People are driven by emotions, experiences, and subconscious motivations, which shape their decisions and relationships. When you tap into these psychological layers, your characters become more than just names on a page—they feel alive.
A strong grasp of psychology helps you craft authentic relationships, believable conflicts, and compelling character arcs. Whether it’s understanding how trauma shapes behavior, how people lie to themselves, or how emotions drive decision-making, psychological realism makes your characters more engaging.
By studying human nature—through observation, psychology books, or personal experience—you can create characters that resonate deeply with readers, making their stories more powerful.
Your Characters are Not You
One of the biggest mistakes writers make is creating characters that are simply extensions of themselves. While personal experiences can inspire character development, your characters should have their own personalities, beliefs, and perspectives.
They don’t exist to express your opinions or mirror your life—they are individuals shaped by their own fictional histories. If every character reflects the writer’s own mindset, they lose depth and realism, making it harder for readers to see them as fully formed people.
If every character shares the same way of thinking, speaking, and reacting, the narrative lacks variety and intrigue. Readers engage with characters who have distinct voices, conflicting viewpoints, and unique emotional responses.
Diversity in thought and personality creates richer interactions, natural tension, and a more immersive story. By allowing your characters to develop independently from yourself, you ensure that they feel dynamic, unpredictable, and, most importantly, real.
Even when writing characters with beliefs you don’t personally agree with, it’s essential to give them legitimate motivations and arguments. A one-dimensional antagonist who is “wrong” simply because they oppose the protagonist—or the author’s own views—feels shallow and unconvincing.
People believe what they believe for a reason, and well-written characters should, too. By exploring different perspectives with depth and nuance, you not only make your characters more compelling but also challenge readers to think critically. A well-developed character doesn’t need to be likable or “correct” to be interesting—they just need to be real.
Building Your Character Bios
Creating a compelling character bio is an essential step in developing well-rounded and believable characters. Whether you’re writing a protagonist, antagonist, or side character, a thoughtful bio serves as a foundation that brings them to life on the page.
There’s an endless number of things you can include in your character bios. The following lists are meant to serve as inspiration. DO NOT think you should make bios containing information on all the options below.
- Basic Information: Name (Include nicknames, aliases, or titles if applicable), age, gender, species/race/ethnicity (If applicable to fantasy or sci-fi settings), sexual orientation, nationality.
- Physical Description: Height, weight, body type (slim, muscular, stocky, etc.), hair color and style, eye color, skin tone, distinguishing features (scars, tattoos, birthmarks, freckles, etc.), clothing style (everyday wear, formal, casual, etc.), accessories/jewelry (signature items like a locket, ring, or weapon), posture and body language.
- Personality & Traits: Personality type, speech patterns, catchphrases, verbal tics, temperament, core strengths (loyal, brave, intelligent, etc.), core weaknesses/flaws (arrogant, impulsive, anxious, etc.), interests, fears, phobias, pet peeves (things that irritate them), habits and quirks (tapping fingers, biting nails, humming when nervous), sense of humor (dry, sarcastic, dark, slapstick, etc.)
- Background & History: Family members (parents, siblings, extended family), upbringing, childhood experiences, key life events, education level, occupation and work experience, financial status, social status (upper class, middle class, lower class, outlaw, etc.), cultural or religious beliefs, languages spoken
- Relationships & Connections: Closest friends, allies, rivals, enemies, mentors, role models, love interests
- Psychology & Motivation: Greatest desires, dreams, biggest fears, insecurities, moral compass, personal philosophy (what they believe about life and people), emotional stability (calm and collected, easily stressed, etc.), coping mechanisms (healthy and unhealthy), triggers, trauma, how they react to conflict (fight, flight, freeze, or fawn)
While it’s tempting to map out every tiny aspect—like their favorite childhood toy or daily morning routine—too much information can be overwhelming and unnecessary.
Focus on the most important elements: their personality, beliefs, moral compass, motivations, relationships, and internal/external conflicts. These aspects drive their actions and make them feel real to the reader. It’s also the things that help you write consistent characters.
Physical descriptions, background, and habits should support these core traits rather than overshadow them. A well-balanced character bio is concise yet detailed enough to provide a strong foundation for storytelling.
Character Writing Pitfalls
We’ll end this post by focusing on a few things to watch out for. Avoiding these pitfalls will help you craft compelling, believable characters:
- The Perfect Character (Mary Sue/Gary Stu): A character with no flaws, struggles, or challenges, making them unrealistic and unrelatable.
- Inconsistent Behavior: Characters acting in ways that contradict their established personality, motivations, or beliefs without explanation.
- Too Many Characters with No Purpose: Overcrowding the story with unnecessary characters, making the narrative confusing and unfocused.
- One-Dimensional Villains: Antagonists who are evil for no reason, lacking depth or understandable motivations.
- Characters Without Agency: Characters who passively react to events rather than making decisions or taking action, making them feel unimportant.
- Unrealistic Transformations: Characters who undergo sudden, unbelievable changes without sufficient buildup or explanation.
- All Characters Sound the Same: A lack of distinct voices or personalities, making it hard to differentiate characters, especially in dialogue.
- Overuse of Quirks: Overloading a character with quirky traits or habits, making them feel gimmicky rather than realistic.
- Forgetting Consequences: Characters who experience major events without any lasting emotional or practical consequences.
- Lack of Mystery or Intrigue: Characters who are fully understood from the start, leaving no curiosity or layers to explore.
- Forgetting Growth for Secondary Characters: Supporting characters who remain static while only the protagonist evolves, making them feel underdeveloped.
