Making characters real

(For the record, I've still been thinking about the nature of this blog. What I'd like for it to be is a series of dialogues about writing and publishing, where I'll toss out a topic that I've been thinking about in hopes of learning from others' comments. I'm not making any assumption about the value of my own opinion. I'm not an expert, nor do I play one on TV.)


I've been working on characterization the last week or two, specifically how you make a character seem completely real. A real person, if you will, rather than a cliché. One thing I've discovered is that it's not a process I've given a lot of thought to. Most of my characters have seemed to grow almost organically out of the story. (Which is a good thing, I think, but that doesn't mean the process couldn't be improved upon.)

When I wrote the fanfic novel, I decided early on that the main character would be a woman who was doing the best she could in some rather horrific situations all the while doubting herself. Everything she became and did later in the story flowed from that one decision.

But last week, I saw a question or comment somewhere to the effect of, 'how do you turn a character into more than a list of traits?' and I realized I didn't know. If you begin building a character by thinking, 'let's see...he's smart, a bit of a geek, compassionate, always learning new things' -- what's involved with fleshing that out so you get Tim McGee from NCIS rather than Daniel Jackson from Stargate SG-1?

It's not really fair to start with that kind of example, because in so many ways writing a character for a television series is very different from writing a novel. (Not the least due to the number of people from director to actor that can influence character development.) So perhaps a better example of what I mean would be if I said, 'he's a sexy man of mystery, wealthy and dangerous' ...am I thinking of Evanovich's Ranger, or Roberts' Roarke? On the surface, that statement applies to both, and yet they're very different characters, right from the first book in their respective series.

So what do you add? Or more importantly, how do you add it?

One obvious answer is background, though given the writers that create a background for a character and then divorce the two, you have to wonder how obvious it really is. If you give a character a nightmarish childhood, you either need to show that it's still affecting him, or you need to explain how he overcame it, and I don't always see that happen.

Ah, but that leads to a separate issue, doesn't it? You can't spend a lot of time in the character's background, particularly in the first part of the book. But even if you never tell the reader what the character's childhood was like, you need to know how it affected her. And you have to be consistent with it.

Another possibility, based on things I've read/heard other writers say, are goals and motives. What does the character want, and why? This one strikes me as more critical than background, actually. Two characters similar on the surface, even with similar backgrounds, are going to behave very differently if they've got different goals.

(And as I'm thinking about it, it occurs to me that if there's a link between character motivation and background, that's even better.)

The last thing I've been considering is mannerisms and habits. I admit that this is one I've not worried about in the past, but I'm rethinking that. We all have mannerisms -- things we do that aren't terribly significant in themselves but which set us apart from other people -- so why shouldn't our characters? I think this is tricky, though, because it can so easily become annoying if overused. A character playing with her hair when she's nervous can get old fast.

So...when you think of your favorite characters, what is it that sets them apart from other characters that might be similar to them on the surface? What makes them 'real'?