Writing the Narrative Short

📖Writing the Narrative Short Unit 2 – Developing Characters

Character development is the art of crafting compelling fictional personas that resonate with readers. It involves shaping personalities, motivations, and growth arcs that bring characters to life on the page. This process requires building strong foundations, creating rich backstories, and developing unique voices for each character. Writers must balance showing and telling, craft believable relationships, and avoid common pitfalls to create memorable, authentic characters.

What's Character Development?

  • Character development involves creating and shaping fictional characters in a story
  • Includes crafting their personalities, motivations, and growth throughout the narrative
  • Requires establishing a character's background, traits, and how they change over time
  • Aims to make characters feel authentic, relatable, and engaging to readers
  • Involves showing characters' thoughts, feelings, and actions through dialogue, description, and plot events
  • Ensures characters have distinct voices and mannerisms that set them apart from others
  • Focuses on characters' internal struggles, conflicts, and how they overcome challenges

Building Character Foundations

  • Start by determining a character's basic attributes such as name, age, gender, and occupation
  • Establish their primary goal or motivation that drives their actions in the story
  • Define their key personality traits, both positive (loyal, brave) and negative (impulsive, jealous)
  • Consider their physical appearance, including distinguishing features or mannerisms
  • Determine their role in the story, whether protagonist, antagonist, or supporting character
  • Identify their strengths and weaknesses that will impact their journey
  • Decide on their core values, beliefs, and moral code that guide their decisions
    • These can be shaped by their upbringing, culture, or personal experiences

Creating Backstories

  • A character's backstory includes their history and life events prior to the story's beginning
  • Develop key moments or turning points in their past that shaped who they are
  • Consider their family background, childhood experiences, and important relationships
  • Determine their education level, skills, and any notable accomplishments or failures
  • Identify any traumas, losses, or significant challenges they've faced
    • These can be sources of internal conflict or motivation in the present story
  • Establish their social status, financial situation, and living conditions
  • Create a timeline of their life events leading up to the story's start

Crafting Unique Voices

  • A character's voice includes their distinct way of speaking, thinking, and expressing themselves
  • Use dialogue to showcase a character's personality, background, and emotional state
  • Consider a character's vocabulary, sentence structure, and speech patterns
    • Are they formal or casual, verbose or terse, articulate or inarticulate?
  • Infuse dialogue with subtext, revealing what a character leaves unsaid or implies
  • Ensure a character's inner thoughts align with and deepen their unique perspective
  • Utilize body language and gestures to convey a character's mood and intentions
  • Let a character's voice evolve over the course of the story as they grow and change

Showing vs. Telling in Characterization

  • Showing reveals character through actions, dialogue, thoughts, and reactions
  • Telling directly states a character's traits or feelings without demonstrating them
  • Use vivid descriptions and sensory details to immerse readers in a character's experience
  • Convey a character's emotions through physical reactions (racing heart, clenched fists) rather than naming the emotion outright
  • Reveal personality and motivations through a character's choices and behaviors
    • How they treat others, handle stress, or make decisions
  • Utilize subtext and implication to suggest a character's inner state
  • Balance showing and telling, using telling sparingly for efficiency or emphasis

Character Arcs and Growth

  • A character arc is the journey of change and growth a character undergoes in the story
  • Most protagonists follow a positive change arc, overcoming flaws and challenges to become better versions of themselves
  • Flat arcs involve characters who remain largely unchanged but inspire change in others or the world around them
  • Negative change arcs see characters devolve or succumb to their flaws and weaknesses
  • Character growth often involves a series of turning points or key events that shift their perspective
  • Characters' wants and needs should evolve as they learn and grow throughout the story
  • A character's growth should be gradual, believable, and tied to their experiences in the plot

Relationships and Interactions

  • Relationships between characters reveal personality, create conflict, and advance the plot
  • Establish characters' history and dynamics, including power imbalances or unresolved issues
  • Use dialogue to show how characters communicate, argue, and express affection
  • Develop characters' roles in each other's lives (mentor, rival, love interest) and how those roles may shift
  • Create contrasts and parallels between characters to highlight their unique traits
  • Allow relationships to evolve and change as characters grow and face new challenges together
  • Explore how characters' differing goals, values, or worldviews create tension and conflict

Advanced Techniques and Common Pitfalls

  • Use foils (characters with opposing traits) to highlight a main character's qualities
  • Employ archetypes (the mentor, the trickster) to evoke familiar roles and expectations
  • Subvert character tropes and stereotypes to create surprising, memorable characters
  • Avoid creating "Mary Sues" or "Gary Stus" - overly perfect, idealized characters without flaws
  • Beware of character inconsistencies or actions that contradict their established traits and motivations
  • Ensure supporting characters are fully developed and not just plot devices or one-dimensional stereotypes
  • Challenge characters with difficult moral dilemmas that test their beliefs and reveal their true nature
    • Force them to make hard choices with consequences that propel the story forward


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© 2024 Fiveable Inc. All rights reserved.
AP® and SAT® are trademarks registered by the College Board, which is not affiliated with, and does not endorse this website.