Congratulations, you created a little guy! Now, we want to ensure that he (or she or they or it) will withstand the horrors of being thrust in front of an unloving audience.
I’ve invented some exercises that may help you refine your characterization and ensure that you have created a well-rounded, interesting character who has deep motivations and a consistent personality.
These are the not the end-all-be-all of characterization; they’re not meant to be. Nor are they the only exercises you can do to ensure that your characters feel real.
Remember: characters aren’t people, but they should feel like people.
However, I hope these will give you a jumping-off point to tinker with your characters a bit more. Who knows? Maybe you’ll even end up writing what you thought about here.
Also, they are in no particular order of importance, so pick the ones that feel relevant to you and leave the rest. Or do them all, I’m not your mom.
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Identity Powerwash
I put this one first because failures in this department make me the maddest. The personal interest in good representation cannot be helped, given that I am very lesbian.
Anyway.
Purpose: To ensure you are not using labels to bolster a character rather than making them interesting on their own (my pet peeve) or that you are actually delving into their identities so that they feel like a product of their culture, upbringing, experiences, etc.
Good for: Characters with marginalized identities.
Used on: Usually MCs, but could be anyone.
How to do the exercise: Swap all the labels you’ve given a character. If they are POC, make them white. If they are neurodivergent, make them neurotypical. If they are queer, make them straight. If they are disabled, make them abled. If they’re a dragon, make them a human.
Do you find that you can’t actually figure out who they are beyond their identities? Do they act the same way despite their labels being removed?
This tells you that:
- You have not created a whole and interesting character beyond how they identify; and/or,
- You have not delved deep enough into their identities to make these labels an integral part of who they are; and/or,
- You do not know enough about the identities to portray them in a deep, sensitive way that influences the plot.
As an aside, I see this a lot in queer stories written by straight people or amateur writers. Gay love is too icky and scary for the writer. If you didn’t know better, you’d think that the MC and Love Interest are just really good friends; there’s no tension, no affection, no intensity.
I am whapping you with a rolled-up newspaper. Make them gayer.
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Alternate Universe (AU)
Purpose: To determine whether your character would feel “real” outside of the specific plot.
Good for: Characters who are bound by the narrative or seem to be pushed around by the plot too much.
Used on: Any character, but especially the MC.
How to do the exercise: Imagine a setting that is completely opposite to what you have in your story. This means you can’t just transfer a Fantasy character into a SciFi story; they’re too similar.
Instead, think of putting a thriller character into a romance, or a fantasy character into a slice-of-life modern novel, or a literary character in a silly generic story.
How would they react? Would they still function as a character? Could you imagine them doing this?
My personal Eirenic Verses AU is Uileac and Cerie as blues-rock musicians (Cerie singer-songwriter, Uileac guitarist) who need a drummer. Guess who happens to be a very very sexy yet infuriatingly unavailable drummer? Yeah. Orrinir.
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Plot Eradication
Purpose: To determine whether the character is completely driven by the plot or would have interest on their own. Works similar to the above, but more radically.
Good for: Characters who are too bound by the narrative.
Used on: MC.
How to do the exercise: Remove the plot. Just get rid of it. The inciting incident never happened, the dragon didn’t destroy the village, whatever.
Would you be able to come up with something else for the character to do? Could you imagine a different story for them within this same universe? If not, then your character is too wrapped up in this specific plot and could not stand on their own. They only exist for this one purpose. You need to give them more agency.
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Domino Plot Disaster
Purpose: To see if your character is making decisions that directly shape the plot, or if the plot seems to thrum on without them doing anything.
Good for: Characters that are too bound by the narrative.
Used on: MC, but could also be used on side characters.
How to do the exercise: At a pivotal plot point, make the character do something else. They may fail during a fight, or they may refuse to do something, or they may run away when the confrontation comes. It can even be smaller things, like refusing to talk to someone who could have given them good information.
Does the plot still get to where it needs to go without them doing what they did originally? Then you have built a good plot, to be sure, but the character is just being dragged along on strings, not making their own choices. Consider how you can give them more agency.
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The No-Good Very-Bad Day
Purpose: To understand a character’s motivations beyond another character, vocation, or activity.
Good for: Characters who do not have a clear drive or purpose in their lives, especially MCs whose lives revolve around a Love Interest.
Used on: Usually MCs with a Love Interest.
How to do the exercise: Have the worst possible thing that could ever happen to a character … happen. Could be their partner dying, their home being destroyed, losing their job, whatever.
Now explain how they come back from this. Do not let them just kill themselves! Consider how they would build their life back up and what would encourage them to go on. This helps us understand what, beyond circumstance, really drives them.
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Line Swapping
Purpose: To ensure that characters are differentiated enough.
Good for: Characters that are too similar to each other.
Used on: Two characters who you worry are too alike. Often the MC and Love Interest.
How to do the exercise: Take “quintessential” lines from the two characters and swap them for one another. Don’t pick ones that are just “okay” or whatever; choose ones that you feel really distill their personality.
Now you take Character A’s line and attribute it to Character B, and vice versa. Do this for as many lines as you feel is necessary. Preferably, you’ll create a new “trick” draft just for this exercise. Keep everything else the same so you’re forced to reread everything to find what you changed.
Now wait a week or two and revisit the text. Did you even notice that the character lines were switched without remembering where you put it? That means you need to work on differentiating them more.
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Character Swapping
Purpose: To ensure that every character is differentiated enough; similar to above, but more global.
Good for: Side characters.
Used on: Mostly side characters (we will assume your MC can’t be swapped out).
How to do the exercise: Take an action point and change who does it. For example, “Aya swung the sword high” becomes “Pima swung the sword high.” Preferably, you will do this for more than a few character actions.
As with line swapping, let it sit for a while and see if you even noticed that you changed which side character did the action. If you didn’t, then you can merge the two characters (Pimaya?), remove one, or work on differentiating them more, depending on how important they are.
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Dramatis Personnae
Purpose: To ensure you do not have too many background characters.
Good for: Stories that have more than 5 named characters.
Used on: All named characters.
How to do the exercise: First, write out a list of all named characters with a brief bio for each of them. For example, “Uileac Korviridi is a cavalryman. He is Orrinir Relickim’s husband and Cerie Korviridi’s older brother.”
Now, pick a metric based on the length of your story. This could be how many times they are named (use Google or Word’s “search” function to figure that out), how many lines they speak, or how many pages/scenes they appear on. Write this down for every single character.
If you find that multiple characters only speak once, or are only named once, or appear in only a single scene, you need to look at them more carefully and decide if they really belong there. If they serve some purpose beyond idle back chatter, you could just not name them.
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Perspective Flip
Purpose: To ensure all characters have coherent reactions to plot points – and that the MC you have chosen is interesting enough.
Good for: Wooden MCs or undifferentiated side characters.
Used on: Side characters.
How to do the exercise: Rewrite a scene from the perspective of a side character. Does the scene feel different? More interesting? What are they thinking about that is different than the MC? Do this for as many side characters as you want.
You might find that this allows you to differentiate them more and provide more interesting actions when you return to your main perspective. You may even find that your actual MC isn’t as interesting as your side characters and that you have more work to do on them.
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Hello, Human Resources?!
Purpose: In genres other than straight smut, to determine whether a love interest’s actions are actually sweet, or whether the Love Interest is just physically attractive. (Inspired by the “Hello, Human Resources?!” meme.)
Good for: Love Interests who the author has firmly established is incredibly hot, with reams of pages about their glistening abs, but who is kind of an asshole.
Used on: Love Interests.
How to do the exercise: Swap out the incredibly handsome sexy fabulous good-looking rich Love Interest with some schlub, whatever that means to you.
Do their lines now feel icky? Creepy? Has all the chemistry gone bye-bye? Then that means you need to work on developing the relationship beyond “Love Interest is hot.”
Now, it’s fine if MC likes them as a friend because they’re not physically attracted to them anymore. But if MC would be utterly repulsed by everything they do now that they don’t have a ripped six-pack, you’ve got to fix stuff.
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POV Mergers
Purpose: To ensure that you are using just enough POVs to tell the story. The more POVs you have, the more confusing it gets for the reader, and the more likely they are to give up.
Good for: Stories that have more than two POVs. Two POVs are common when telling a love story from both sides and is typically not a problem.
Used on: All POV characters.
How to do the exercise: Pick a POV and try telling it from one of the other POVs. Does it still work, or would it be impossible to explain things that way?
For example, it would be incredibly difficult to tell the same story without three POVs if all the characters are separated for a significant period of time, or if they all have different information that they are refusing to share until a significant reveal (such as in a murder mystery).
It would not be incredibly difficult to tell the same story if all the characters are together throughout the entire story and you’re just splitting POVs because you think it makes it sound more intellectual.
Using this might also show you which POV is the most interesting and which is weaker, so you can Kirby-style absorb one POV into another.
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I hope these exercises were helpful. You may find that you need to significantly revamp your characters to add more agency, create more interest, or flesh them out. That’s okay; we’re all learning all the time.
Keep working at it, think carefully about what you want from a character, and you’ll begin developing more exciting characters in no time.