Characters

My favorite part of writing are the characters. I love watching them develop into “people” with lives and relationships.

I usually have a theme or part of a plot already in mind by the time I get to the characters. Let’s say that a young man is accused of beating his girlfriend to death. That is the idea that my storyline is going to be based on. The victim is the girlfriend. The main suspect is the young man. Hidden in the storyline will be the real killer – the villian. Let’s make our slueth the boy’s father.

Since the story is going to be from the slueth’s point of view, we are going to develop him first. Do I know any of the skills he may need in this story? I may or may not. In this case we’ll say that he’s going to have to know karate to defend himself somewhere in the future.

Fleshing out the stick figure is fun.  There’s so much more to a character than his outward appearance.

I like to start with the family. Especailly since its going to be important to this storyline. He is married and has at least one son. What are the family dynamics? What secret would he rather his wife not know? How he sees and treats his wife may be indicative of how he sees women in general. If he thinks his wife is stupid and inept, he’ll treat other women that way – but to a lesser degree. His wife would probably act in similiar ways that his mother did.

What is his job? For a lot of men – their jobs define who they are. What traits does his job bring out in him? What was his dream job as a child? Why did he settle for something else? Or did he?

Are there any specific defining moments from his past?

How does he feel about other characters? What relationship does he have with them?

We’ll use this framework to get started. Things will change and develop as you go. That’s normal.

Where I am from in northern Indiana, there is a lot of Amish and Mennonite influence. A character name that would reflect that area could be Marlin Shrock.

We’ve already decided that Marlin is our slueth and a skill that he will need is going to be karate. Why did he learn karate? Did he learn it in the military? Oh, that’s right, he didn’t go into the military. I know. He took classes and got a black belt when he was a kid because the neighborhood bully picked on him for years. He wanted the confidence to defend himself. But he never used it. He allowed himself to be bullied.

Marlin met Anita at church. They dated for a year before getting married. They did everything to be “proper”. Marlin has a need for everything to look good on the surface no matter what is underneath. Anita and the boys must have on their best clothes and be on their best behaviour, otherwise Marlin takes it as an insult to himself.

Marlin says he doesn’t believe in confrontation. He assumes that he’s the bread winner, so whatever he wants to do is fine. If Anita doesn’t agree or approve – oh well. That’s her problem. Her job is to take care of the kids and the house. Of course, as soon as the kids were in school he expected her to get a job because she wasn’t going to sit around the house doing nothing. The secret that he doesn’t want her to find out is that he sees himself as worthless and inept. He puts on a macho facade to cover the feelings. What he doesn’t know is that Anita has already figured it out, so she makes excuses for the bad behaviour. The way that they interact is the same way that his parents interacted with each other, but he doesn’t see that.

Marlin and Anita have two boys, Gene is seventeen and Corey is fourteen. His relationship with the boys is minimal. He’s like a stranger in his own home. When he gets home from work, Marlin parks himself in front of the t.v. He talks at the boys or lectures them instead of talking to them. His idea of spending time with them is for them to join him in what he’s doing. He wants nothing to do with their interests. Instead of following the established family flow, Marlin will start barking out orders and insults. He has no sense of fairness in his demands. As a result, Marlin doesn’t understand the resentment that the boys feel.

Marlin works in a factory as a maintenance man. He enjoys the mobility that he has maintaining the machines throughout the factory. He is sociable and enjoys visiting with a wide variety of people, including some “harmless” flirtations. He enjoys the attention, but prides himself on his fidelity to Anita. But sometimes he wonders if she’s been faithful or not.

As a young man, Marlin dreamed of being a pilot. His father said that it was stupid and Marlin wasn’t smart enough to learn. So Marlin decided to join the airforce to learn how to fly. Both of his parents have strong Amish influence and are pacifists. So they convinced him not to join and pushed him into working at his father’s fix-it shop.

Does Marlin seem a little more real? Not only do we have the conflicts that will come from the plot, we will have internal conflicts.  We have a father who will be faced with the idea that his son killed someone. Not only will he have to face the church, he will eventually have to face himself and his parenting skills. In a good storyline the main character changes somehow. In this set up, Marlin will have to change his relationship with his family to overcome the situation. All heroes have to have flaws to be interesting and relatable.

Need help learning to flesh out your character? One thing that I do is to “interview them” I write a question, then rapid write whatever comes to mind. I also include questions about how that character may feel or what he/she thinks about other characters. You’ll be surprised at some of the answers that you get.

In mystery writing the victim is really the central character to the storyline. Everything that happens is because of this person. Even though the other characters give additional layers to the storyline and have their own stories, it all comes about because of their intersection with the victim. So the backstory that happens before the murder is essential.

In our example we decided that the victim was beat to death and it is assumed to have been her boyfriend, Gene Shrock.  Gene is seventeen, so we will make her about the same age. But she needs a name. So keeping in mind that this is a religious area and the age group she’s in…how about Bethany Miller? The name sounds contemporary and the last name is indicitive of the area.

So our victim is a seventeen-year-old high school student. We know that Gene didn’t really commit the murder or we wouldn’t have a story. So who did? Because she is young and a lot of readers will have children this age, you’ll really need to consider what type of person that she is carefully. Is she a young women that didn’t have a chance in life because of her upbringing? Maybe from a grifter family? Or could it be that she saw or knew something and wanted to do the right thing – and was killed to prevent her from telling? In a story, nothing can happen without a reason. Nothing random will work. That cheats your reader. It could be a case of mistaken identity, but never random.

So why was Bethany murdered? Being seventeen she would be at the age that she would want to explore the world and her options. It shows in Bethany’s choice of friends. Her best friend, Cathy, is clean cut and the kind that parents love. But Cathy is Bethany’s cover. Sometimes she would sneak out and go to a party or hang out on the fringes of a group that she saw as exciting and dangerous. And they are dangerous, but Bethany doesn’t have the life skills to understand that they can be dangerous to her. 

Gene knows some of these people, that’s how Bethany met them. But Gene doesn’t know how involved she was with them when he wasn’t around. So he doesn’t really suspect any of them.

Now we know that Bethany was murdered by someone in the fringe group that she hung with. She was beat to death. Maybe like a gang initiation? Or maybe instead of her jumping into the gang, killing her was the initiation for someone else.

So future characters to flesh out will be the gang leader and the person being initiated. Maybe the gang leader wanted to be with Bethany and she rejected him in a humiliating way in front of the other members. Having her killed would show his followers the result of disrespect. So now we have motive.

We have the who – the one being initiated, we have the how – beat to death, and we have the why – to make an example of her.

So now is the time to do any research you may need on gangs. It’s not an area where it would be full of organized gangs, so maybe make it a gang of wannabees. Then the rules aren’t quite as precise.

Now would be the time to write the backstory. Write about Bethany’s last twenty-four hours on earth. Start with the routine and work your way into everything that happened that lead to the murder. Including Cathy covering for her, humiliating the leader, and any other thing that you can think of that will help flesh out your story. This backstory will provide you will clues and help you to keep straight the reason things happened and who was there.

 

Recommended reading:

Building Believable Characters by Marc McCutcheon

The Writer’s Guide to Character Traits by Linda N Edelstein, Ph.D

The Complete Writers Guide to Heroes & Heroines by Tami D Cowden, Caro LaFever, Sue Vidrs

45 Master Characters by Victoria Lynn Schmidt

Want something to make your character stand out even more? Check out this ebook. 1001 Character Quirks There are quite a few quirks listed on this website.