by Ally Carter
As a rule, it’s a lot easier to describe supporting characters because very few people ever think about their own hair or eye color, so it’s not a natural thing for a POV character to do. The one thing you don’t want to do is have your narrator looking at themselves in the mirror, describing their reflections. Editors and agents see this so often from first-time writers that it’s frowned upon.
So try other approaches. Maybe another character should comment on the hero’s eyes. Maybe the heroine can think about changing her hair.
You don’t need a lot. As a rule, a little bit of description goes a long way. But do try to work in a little bit up front. Then make sure your characters are far more than just their eye colors. Because in the long run, that might be the least important thing about them.
Unfortunately, when I talk to new writers and ask them about their characters, I find that a lot of times they will have given a lot of thought to the physical but not much thought to anything else.
“Tell me about your heroine …”
“Well, she has red hair, and one blue eye and one brown eye. And she’s left-handed. And she’s about my height but never wears heels.”
Those are all character descriptors. They’re not character traits. And that is a really big, really important distinction.
Now, I’m not going to argue that a person’s physical appearance can’t affect their personality and background—it totally, 100 percent does. And, obviously, ethnicity can and will play a big role in shaping not only a character’s cultural background but also some of the ways that they might interact with the world.
But a person’s physical description is not all a person is. It shouldn’t be all your character is, either.
Finally, I think a mistake a lot of writers make early in their careers is they pick a section of the book to try to do a thing and then they set out to accomplish that thing right then. Right there. They put everything they know down on the page like it’s mashed potatoes on a cafeteria tray. Dump. And then, mission accomplished, they move on to the next thing.
There are times for that—make no mistake. But when it comes to creating characters and making them seem real, then that isn’t accomplished by dumping a lot of facts onto the page at one time.
Most characters—like real people—will become more fully formed the more time you spend with them. So don’t worry about making sure your readers get everything you know about your characters in one shot. You’ve got a whole book to flesh them out.
DEAR GORDON KORMAN,
Do you have any words of wisdom for making good characters?
I have to resist the tendency to paint with too broad a brush, so my favorite editorial advice is to find nuance. Villains can still have admirable traits. Scoundrels can be lovable. And it’s always intriguing when our favorite characters have to wrestle with their dark sides and make hard choices.
This is yet another thing that will no doubt vary case by case and writer by writer, but one thing I find myself saying a lot—especially as I work on my first and second drafts—is that “the characters haven’t shown up yet.”
Now, that’s not to say that I’m missing characters. It’s not even to say that I’m writing the wrong characters. It just means that they don’t feel real yet. They’re pencil sketches, still needing paint and color and texture. I haven’t fleshed them out, brought them from archetypes (the nerd, the jock, the femme fatale, etc.) to characters that go beyond type and become something more.
I can’t really know someone after one meeting, and I can’t really nail a character in one draft.
Even if you know all their secrets and their details, there will be some stuff that’s in your head but not on the page. Yet. That’s what future drafts are for. It always takes a few drafts for all the colors and details I have in my head to actually make it into my books.
So if your characters don’t show up in your first drafts either? That’s okay. Just keep writing and rewriting until everyone is there!
DEAR CHRISTINA DIAZ GONZALEZ,
Do you have any tips/tricks for getting to know your characters?
I like to discover a secret (hidden wish, fear, or past event) that the character reveals to no one except me. This gives me insight into their personality and can help shape some of their decisions. It also makes them feel more “real” in my mind.
Real people have pros. And real people have cons. I think a lot of new writers struggle with the cons part. In fact, I think one of the hardest things about starting to write is figuring out that bad stuff has to happen. A lot of writers love their characters. They don’t want to see them make mistakes. They certainly don’t want to see them suffer.
But mistakes and suffering are conflict. And conflict is gas in the tank (more on that a little later). Sometimes your characters have to make mistakes and/or be a Not Good Version of themselves. That’s what will make them feel human.
Real people also have quirks and hang-ups, annoying habits and pet peeves. Giving your fictional people some of these little mannerisms or tendencies can really go a long way toward making them feel more real to your readers.
Maybe your heroine never leaves home without a ponytail holder on her wrist. Maybe your hero doesn’t like his foods to touch. Maybe two of your supporting characters finish each other’s sentences or always coordinate their outfits.
Any writer can create a character who is “the chosen one” or a girl who has a problem at school or a boy who falls into some kind of supernatural conundrum. But only a truly great writer can make readers believe that these people are real (or wish they were).
And the key—the distinction—is in the details. Because the tropes and the overarching character stuff isn’t always that unique or special. But the small beats or moments when a character lets their guard down and shows their soft side to a friend … the little habits or quirks that let the reader pick up on the fact that the character is nervous or scared and trying not to let the world know … that’s where the greatness lies, atop a mountain made out of a million small decisions and precious words. Choose them wisely.
What’s the best writing advice you ever got?
Marissa Meyer Never forget that you’re doing this because it’s FUN.
I’m always surprised by how many times authors are asked where we get the names of our characters. Maybe because, for me, a character’s name isn’t that important. In fact, sometimes I don’t even come up with names until the last minute, using placeholder names for months and then, right before I turn a book in, doing a Find and Replace for something different.
For some authors, though, names are incredibly important, and they’ll spend hours—or days—looking for the perfect names before they write a single word.
A lot of authors rely heavily on online baby name directories when we go name shopping. There are also cool sites that chronicle names through history and in various countries if you’re looking for either an old-fashioned name or a name for a historical character. Sometimes you’ll hear a cool name at a signing or get fascinated with the name of an actress—really, anything goes. When you’re a writer, you’re always on the lookout for stuff you might pick up and use someday. Maybe not that day. But we’re always filing things away for future reference.
I don’t often name characters after real people, but it does happen. Rosie in Embassy Row is named for one of my best friends. Maddie in Not If I Save You First is named for her daughter, largely because I think “Mad Dog” is the greatest nickname ever and I was dying to use it—especially for that book because …
The perfect name is always going to depend on the character.
When I was starting I’d Tell You I Love You, But Then I’d Have to Kill You, it seemed really important that the main character’s name: (1) Start with a C and (2) be a first name that could also be a last name.
Why a C? Because I love alliteration, and I knew she was going to be known as “The Chameleon.” Why a first name that could also be a last name? Becau
se I wanted her first name to be her mother’s maiden name. So “Cameron the Chameleon” was born.
Perhaps my most famous name is W. W. Hale the Fifth from Heist Society. This name came about because, first of all, I needed a name that sounded like Old Money. But I also wanted a guy who was always called by his last name. I didn’t know that my heroine, Kat, would have no idea what the W’s stood for when I set out to write his character. But that’s a detail that came out the first time I wrote them together and it stuck. To this day “What’s Hale’s first name?” is in the top five questions I get asked. People are obsessed with it! (And, yes, I do know what it is. And, no, I’m not going to tell you.)
Coming up with the names of towns/places/things is much the same.
I worried a lot about the name of Adria (in Embassy Row) because for the first time I was inventing an entire country and I wanted something that was evocative of a region of the world, without already being a place in that region. My editor and I spent a lot of time looking at maps, and ultimately, we decided that a country named after the Adriatic Sea would fit the bill.
So there’s no one way to come up with a name. Just keep your eyes and your ears open, and if it doesn’t fit once you start writing, that’s what Find and Replace is for.
Villains are hard. Great villains are (almost) impossible.
I think the key to writing a villain is to spend some time in their skin, thinking about things from their perspective. Spend some time thinking about how you would tell their story from their point of view. Because all characters—even the “bad” ones—are the heroes of their own stories.
Perhaps the best villain in recent memory is the character of Killmonger in Black Panther. He isn’t some one-dimensional bad guy making vague threats or blindly grasping at power. No. He has a legitimate claim to the throne of Wakanda. He was wronged in a very serious and personal way. And he has a very specific goal that is exactly what the hero doesn’t want to happen. Killmonger is a character who has gone down a very dark path that he didn’t entirely choose for himself, and as a result, his character is sympathetic and dynamic, and it’s not hard to imagine what the story would look like with him as the POV character.
As for your villain’s goal—well, that depends on what you want your hero to be doing. Are you writing a very personal story about a girl who overcomes bullying at her school? Or are you writing a big, epic tale with battles and quests?
The villain needs to fit the goal, in other words. And in fact, your villain needs to have their own goal, and that goal should probably somehow relate to their personality and backstory. (And needless to say, it needs to run counter to the hero’s objective.)
Voldemort is the obvious example. He was a half wizard, half Muggle orphan who so hated his Muggle father that he pretty much dedicated his life to destroying anyone who wasn’t a pure-blood wizard.
Even if he’d never attacked Harry Potter’s parents, he and Harry would have been on opposite sides of that fight. But he did attack Harry’s parents, and in doing so, it became personal.
In my opinion, conflict is always better when it’s personal.
It’s also important to point out that you don’t necessarily need a villain to have conflict. One of the first things my mom (the English teacher) ever taught me is that conflict comes in a few forms.
Man vs. Man—so, a villain or antagonist of some kind is going to try to keep me from my goal.
Man vs. Nature—so, a storm is moving in and there’s no shelter and we’re going to die if we don’t figure something out.
Man vs. Himself—so, a man who hasn’t left his apartment in five years is the only person who can stop a murder. But first he has to leave his house. Which he really, really doesn’t want to do.
Man vs. A Ticking Clock—this one is my own, but I think it’s important to mention. This one works well in conjunction with the other types of conflict because most great stories have a sense of urgency about them. Why this is important. Why it’s important now. Sometimes, if the stakes are feeling a little low, I’ll add some kind of ticking clock. An auction that’s going to take place on Christmas Eve. A big dance at school. A storm that’s moving in—something to up the stakes and give things a sense of urgency.
DEAR MARIE LU,
One of the things that I struggle with the most—and that you do the best—is creating villains. So … how do you do it?
It’s both realistic and unsettling to remember that villains are also human, as capable of weaknesses and unique traits as our heroes. I try to go into building a villain remembering that, at one point, they were probably children, too, or had loved or lost someone, or had been somehow molded into who they now are. They likely think that they’re the hero of their own story, that what they’re doing is fundamentally right and that they can’t believe why other people don’t see the world as they do. Put that into your villain—however disturbing, get into their headspace and try to understand what makes them tick. Because villains are not monsters; they are humans, because humans are capable of terrible things. Remembering that will not only make your villains fully fleshed out but even more terrifying figures.
I suppose the short, technical answer to this question is point of view. As I said in the previous question, if you turn the camera around and look at things through the villain’s lens, then that person might very well be the hero of the story. At the very least, they should be the hero of their story.
In fiction, we often talk about protagonists. And we talk about heroes (and heroines). More often than not, we use the terms protagonist and hero interchangeably.
But sometimes protagonists aren’t heroes at all. Sometimes they’re antiheroes—people who aren’t exactly good and aren’t exactly right, but they’re our gateway into that story and so we find ourselves rooting for them just the same.
One of my favorite movies is Ocean’s Eleven. It’s about eleven criminals who band together to rob a Las Vegas casino. So they’re the bad guys, right? Well … see … they should be. But the casino owner is so mean and the thieves are so utterly charming that the audience never even thinks about rooting against them.
Regardless of how good (or maybe not-so-good) your hero is, the hero of your story should always be a person with a goal. Sometimes that goal is physical (throw the One Ring into Mount Doom); sometimes that goal is emotional (survive your sister’s wedding). But whatever the case, we need to be rooting for the heroes to win. To survive. To achieve their goal and be okay afterward. In fact, we want the events of this book to teach our heroes some kind of lesson and make them stronger and better than they ever were before.
The hero is the person we want to have a happy ending.
(Whether or not you give it to them is entirely up to you!)
You’re right—no one wants to read a story about a character who starts out one way and then goes through a huge ordeal that leaves them … exactly the same. I, for one, feel cheated when that happens. Like I just watched an hour-long home makeover show where designers and contractors worked tirelessly to turn a house … into the exact same house.
No. Your character should always have a before. And they should always have an after. And the two pictures should always be different in some meaningful way.
So how do you keep your character arc from changing who they are as a person? Well, it might help to think of it like this: In the beginning, your character is clay. You’re not changing what they’re made of. You’re shaping it and honing it and putting it through fire to make it tougher (or softer). Your character is still your character. They’re just a more evolved version of themselves.
If you’re worried about them changing too much, you might want to think about it like this: The parts of the character that are affected by the plot will change. The parts that aren’t affected by the plot won’t change.
So if you’re writing a book about a boy who is allergic to nuts and loves heavy metal music and has panic attacks around girls … and then his mom becomes
the headmistress of an all-girls school and he has to live on that campus … well, by the end of that book, he will probably have gotten over the nervous-around-girls thing, right? But I bet he’ll still be allergic to nuts and love heavy metal music.
So what kind of story are you writing? Is it a story about a person who learns to love or trust or believe in themselves? A loner who finds a family? A member of a family who breaks away to stand on their own? Maybe you’re writing a friends-to-lovers romance where a relationship changes forever? Maybe it’s a redemption story where someone makes up for a huge mistake in their past.
Just remember, your character is clay. Your plot is fire. Your plot is the thing that will change them.
This is an incredibly timely and important topic. Diversity and representation are key, not only to writing well-rounded and realistic worlds but to also allowing all types of readers to find themselves in books and for our society to be more empathetic on the whole.
It’s definitely not something to do just because it’s a “hot” topic or it seems like a way of getting a lot of attention or pats on the back. Representation isn’t a gimmick or a shortcut. And it’s not something to be done without a great deal of thought, research, and respect.
If you’re writing about characters who are really different from you, then you’ll want to be especially mindful. You should definitely do a lot of research when writing characters from different ethnic backgrounds or with different abilities or sexual orientations. It’s important that your characters represent how people are—not just the (sometimes stereotypical) way that people have been portrayed in the past.
Read books by authors who come from the background you’re trying to write, and be open to criticism and advice. In some cases, you may want to have your book read and critiqued by a friend who comes from that background or a “sensitivity reader” who offers these kinds of critiques professionally. Whether you use a friend or a pro, be sure to be respectful of people’s time and know that if you’re asking someone to perform a professional service, you should be prepared to pay for their work.