• How to come up with characters’ names
One of the most important decisions you’ll make as a storyteller is the names if your characters. If the names don’t ring right with readers, it can wear on them despite that the rest of your story is exceptional.
• How to create a character’s background
One of the most important steps you can take when outlining a short story is to create your main character’s background. This is not necessarily information used in your story but is in your head as you write it.
• What makes a story character interesting?
What makes an interesting story character for the ages? It’s more than just having them grow or learn something, and it’s more than just having them being be like a real person. While each of those qualities are important, they are no more than a tree or two when you’re looking for a forest.
• Build character by looking at his values
Successfully building a character in a story almost always is the one challenge a writer absolutely must get right. It’s also often the most difficult challenge facing any writer.
• Show rather than tell a character’s personality
All too often, novice writers make the mistake of telling us a character’s personality. Rather than tell her personality, the writer can more successfully raise reader interest by showing it – that is, inferring the character’s personality through a concrete detail.
• Ways to show a character’s personality
Virtually infinite ways exist to show a character’s personality, but all should follow one simple, guiding principle: It must reveal and be grounded in the character’s motivations, that is, what matters most to him.
• Give your character a distinctive voice
Especially if the protagonist is narrating the story, his voice must stand out. It must be distinct and intriguing. The reader should want to follow that character not just to see how he solves the story’s problem but because the character, through his voice, is interesting.
• How to make characters three-dimensional
Today’s sophisticated readers generally demand that your stories contain three-dimensional characters, that is, a protagonist who behaves like a real person and who probably grows by learning something along the way. But how do you create such a character?
• Use catch-phrase when creating a character
When writing your story, you’ll want each of the major characters to be distinct. One of achieving that, especially in genre fiction, is to give a couple of the characters catch-phrases.
• Avoid using Mary Sue character type in stories
Among the many character types to avoid when writing is the Mary Sue. This is an idealized character who stands in for the author as his idealized self.
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My name is Rob Bignell. I’m an affordable, professional editor who runs Inventing Reality Editing Service, which meets the manuscript needs of writers both new and published. I also offer a variety of self-publishing services. During the past decade, I’ve helped more than 400 novelists and nonfiction authors obtain their publishing dreams at reasonable prices. I’m also the author of the Storytelling 101 writing guidebooks, four nonfiction hiking guidebook series, and the literary novel Windmill. Several of my short stories in the literary and science fiction genres also have been published.
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