All Study Guides Writing the Narrative Short Unit 2
📖 Writing the Narrative Short Unit 2 – Developing CharactersCharacter 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