Characters and how to lift them beyond the cardboard cut out

A friend of mine is a fine writer, whose first book was a great success.

His characters were beautifully drawn and tugged us into a poignant memoir. But he had always longed to write a novel. I couldn’t wait to see it.

When he showed me a draft, I couldn’t believe it. The characters were cardboard stereotypes.

“But where are the kind of characters you had in your first book?” I asked.

“But that was non-fiction. This is a novel. I have to make them up.”

But you see, you don’t. You can, but you don’t have to. If you work from real life, think of a real character and lie. Change them to suit your story.

That is important. Real life is fine as inspiration. But don’t stick so closely to the real model that you lose sight of the dramatic imperatives of your story.

If you make a character up from scratch, don’t think of them merely as “the tough game ranger” or the “prostitute with the heart of gold”. Everyone has quirks, inconsistencies and contrasts. Everyone has hopes and dreams, fears and heartaches.

Characters don’t exist in isolation. They are the sum of their history, experiences and personality.

You need to work out far more about a character than will ever actually appear on the page. If you don’t know how someone grew up and what relationship they had with their parents and siblings, you’ll never know how they’ll react to older men, younger women – in fact, to anything at all.

You need to work out how someone appears to others – what they look like, what they do, their work, hobbies and everything else that make up their public self. But everyone has internal characteristics too. You need to know how they feel, what makes them tick, their likes, dislikes, fears and favours.

Don’t forget what they look like and how they feel about themselves.

You need to be able to see and hear your character – to know intuitively how they’ll react.  If you say to yourself: “Hmm, what should I make this character say now, they’ll never sound real.

For more about characters and lifting them beyond the cardboard, see our online writing courses.

Jo-Anne Richards is the author of four novels. Her latest is My Brother’s Book, published by Picador. Order it from Kalahari.net

Her first novel, The Innocence of Roast Chicken, was published by Headline in London, shortlisted for the M-Net Book Prize and nominated for the Impac International Dublin Award. The book was chosen as a Dillon’s Debut in the UK, to be showcased as “an outstanding first novel”. She has published short stories in five collections.

She lectures in journalism and writing skills at Wits University, besides running workshops in literary skills, narrative journalism and Romance writing. She supervises Masters students in the Creative Writing Masters programme at Wits.

She is co-founder of allaboutlove.net, a website dedicated to good reading and writing. The site publishes novels and short stories, and runs interactive online writing courses in romance writing. It includes a basic lesbian romance writing course – thought to be unique.