The characters in your fiction are the key to its success. Your plot needs to keep readers turning pages, but it’s your characters that keep readers coming back for more. If you think about the books you love, the chances are they include memorable characters. Jane Eyre, Inspector Rebus, Fevvers in Nights at the Circus, Poirot.

For many novels, character drives plot, and even if it doesn’t, you could have all the thrilling plot points in the world but if you didn’t involve relatable characters in the action readers would soon get bored. Good characters can often feel more real to readers than the people they know in their everyday lives, and that doesn’t happen by accident. The characters readers love are created by writers with the skills to make us feel we know them.

Why convincing characters are vital in writing fiction

When you have a strong idea for a new piece of writing, it will often be driven by a particular character. It may be a person who is going to fall in love, or a person who investigates a crime, or a person who uncovers a secret – but whatever is at the heart of your idea, the chances are it involves a person. A character. And if you’ve only just thought of them, the chances are that you aren’t going to know much about them at this point. How can you? They’ve only just suggested themselves to you. In the same way you would spend time getting to know a real-life person who interested and intrigued you, as a writer of fiction you need to invest time in getting to know your characters.

How to build a character

Just as you would with a new acquaintance, you might know your character’s name, age, and some sketchy details about their appearance, occupation, background and personality. But sketchy characters, in fiction as in life, aren’t satisfying. You want to know more about them. And just as in real life, it takes time to get beneath the surface and discover all you need to know about a character.

What often happens when you are writing a book is that as you proceed with your first draft, you will discover things you didn’t know about your character. Beginner writers’ manuscripts are often thin on character development at the beginning because of this, and the writer will have to go back and fill in some of what they know.