How to Generate Believable Characters for Your Stories

Readers love getting involved with the characters in your stories. They want fleshed-out real life people that they can sympathise with and feel a connection to. All it needs is a few minutes thought and an action plan.

The secret to developing a believable character revolves around those idiosyncrasies which all of us have in one way or another. Sometimes they are quite noticeable, but often they are more subtle and can slip past us until we really try to spot them. Giving your character one or more of these quirks will bring believability to them because readers will think to them selves, "Aunt Emma used to do that," or "Young Jake down the road is always doing that". Making these connections in a reader's mind makes your character more real simply by association with someone who really is real!

Don't give your characters idiosyncrasies just for the fun of it (and it can be fun), but rather make them relevant to the storyline in some way.

So what sort of idiosyncrasy am I talking about? There are actually more than you can shake a stick at, but I'll give one or two examples to give you the idea.

Do you know one of those people who have an annoying ability to remember everybody's birthday, anniversary, death and goodness knows what and loves sending cards of congratulations. (Well, maybe not for the deaths!) Think of how this obsession might have a bearing on the story. Maybe they sent wedding anniversary cards to two couples, but put them in the wrong envelopes. What trouble could that cause? What if they saw an obituary of a distant acquaintance and sent a card of condolence only to find that it was not really the friend just someone with the same name?

Imagine someone who loves to use long or obscure words. What if someone overhears what a character says, gets the wrong end of the stick and acts upon it?

We all know people who laugh at their own jokes. What if a character tells a joke about another character and laughs, but the one hearing the joke has a high regard/love/admiration for the one who is the butt of the joke and quietly takes exception to them being laughed at. What recourse or revenge might the hearer take against the joker?

A few more obvious ones now, such as someone who: is hopeless at keeping secrets; folds corners of books over; never talks about his past; is always reminded of a story and he just has to tell it. There are many more.

Are you getting the idea? A good way of building an arsenal of character quirks is to observe people you meet or are acquainted with. Once you know what to look for you can soon gather quite a collection!