5 Steps for Creating Life-like Characters
Article by Carter Cada - Written 8/3/2023
Characters: the backbone of every story. While environment and details will add flavor and color to your world, no story can even begin to exist without the characters.
But how often does it happen that you have a great idea for a story, with characters that end up bland, or seem fake? It’s hard to get really involved in a story when the world seems filled with NPCs rather than real people.
So what’s the trick to creating life-like characters? Fabricating an individual with unique perspective, emotions, and beliefs can be a daunting task; not to mention a consistent backstory, motives, and goals. These can make the task seem nigh impossible.
So what to do? Following these tips, you should have some excellent groundwork to begin creating your world’s characters.
Table of contents:
Create the character’s backstory
Determine how background determines character perspective
Use character perspective and backstory to set realistic character goals
Determine how your character desires to achieve their goals
ALWAYS refer back to the character’s traits and goals when determining how a character will act
How to create characters that work
1) Create the character’s history
Before anything, before you’ve even given your character a name, you need to know their backstory. Out of all of the steps people take to create a character, this is the one I see skipped most commonly; unfortunate, because this step is critical to every other step!
So how to you determine a backstory? Depends on what sort of character you are looking to create. Are you trying to create someone discouraged or defeated? Perhaps they lost their family to a tragedy. Looking to create someone haughty and proud? Maybe they were the child of wealthy parents who demanded their child always receive the best
Whatever type of character you are looking to create, backstory is essential.
As an example, let’s work on a character together.
Let’s say I’m telling a story set in the industrial revolution. My story is about a factory worker who discovers a secret treasure, and has to escape the country to prevent others from stealing it. The main character has a friend we’ll call “Fogram”.
What kind of person is Fogram? Let’s say he is a kindly old man who gives advice to our main character throughout the story. Maybe he even accompanies him out of the country.
What, then, is Fogram’s backstory? We’ll say that he grew up the son of farmers, away from the city. His parents were tender, compassionate people. They were also stern, however, and corrected Fogram when he did wrong. Fogram had a gentle and trusting heart as a child, so this led him to grow into much the same kind of person as his parents
Things like location and time period also contribute heavily to good character development.
When he was a young man, his parents fell ill. He moved to the city to garner work in a factory in order to support them, but his efforts were not enough. His parent’s died of illness, leaving their land and home to him. However, before he left, he was fooled into giving away all he owned to a man pretending to be in need, and was thus forced to work in the factory.
At first, he was angry; but an older man there whom we’ll call “Jacqimo” taught him the value of trusting that the Lord would place him where he was needed. Learning this, Fogram decided he would be used by God to encourage others where he was, hence, his being an encouragement to our main character.
So, why is any of that important?
Character backstory is like the supporting frame of a building. Without it, you can create a light-weight façade, but nothing more. The façade may look nice, but no real weight can be rested on it.
In the same way, a character without a backstory is limited to being very one-dimensional; they can offer a few sayings, offer some advice, but little more.
The great thing about backstory is that, even though you may never use all of it, the more you have, the more you can develop it. For example, say you write a book, and one of your deuteragonists (non-main character, for the rest of us) becomes incredibly popular, and you want to do a spin-off series about them.
You will very quickly run into problems if they have a poorly fleshed-out backstory. You’ll be forced to come up with info on the spot at the risk of contradicting past content, and being forced to ret-con material (something that tends to be unpopular).
My personal philosophy on the subject: include more backstory that you could ever even hope to use.
Like any quality product, the more you put into, the more others will get out of it. While you may not need to go as far as I do, never skimp on backstory.
2) Determine how backstory affects character perspective
The next step in developing a character is analyzing how their backstory affects the way they look at life. This task is a little easier than the last, but just as important.
Most of what makes a person do and feel what they do is their background. Someone who grew up surrounded by crime will naturally be more distrustful that someone who grew up in a small, tight-knit society.
In the same way, it is essential that you make the connection between your character’s past and their present outlook on life.
Let’s look at Fogram again.
Because of his unique backstory, Fogram is probably more naturally dispositioned towards being kind and gentle towards others. His being cheated out of his belongings might make him vengeful, but because of his past, he was willing to move on.
Maybe, though, your character has a long and storied past of being cheated and used. By the time they are introduced in your story, they are trying to learn to trust again. However, deep inside, they will break if betrayed one more time.
These are the sorts of things that add consistency to the ways your characters behave. If they don’t have a backstory (as real people do) they will not act like real people (as real people also tend to do).
Our outlook on life is the sum total of our life’s experiences. Since we are fully developed as adults, this means that our childhood is the largest contributing factory determining who we, and by extent our characters, are.
This backstory-perspective connection is also where you are going to set up major parts of a character’s arc. Sudden wealth leads to moral failure? It started here. A word broken leads to a pledge for vengeance? That starts here too.
The backstory-perspective connection is also what will help your audience understand why your character’s act and think the way they do.
I have read many books where a character behaves oddly, erratically, and for no discernable reason. As a reader, I could not focus on the plot, because I was always wondering what was going on with the character.
I have read many other books where a character behaved and thought the same way, and yet, because I was clued into the why of the situation, everything made perfect sense.
In a word: characters with poor backstory-perspective development become distractions, not delights.
The goal is to have characters who add something to your story, never take away. If not fully developed, they will certainly do the first.
3) Use character perspective and backstory to set realistic character goals
Personal goals are the difference between a person and a plot device. We’ve all read a book, watched a movie, or played a game with this character in it: they have no goals, no aspirations, rarely have a sense of humor, and seem to be there conveniently whenever the developer/director/author needs something to happen.
In the universal measure of intelligence, they are a step above sentient.
Barely.
Now, I get it, it’s easy to do: your hero needs a sidekick (after all, it’s the oldest troupe in the book, right?). Funny thing is, you rarely hear people say that their dream is to be a sidekick. Why? Because no one does, it stinks.
If your goal is to create a throw-away character for a plot device or comedic effect, fine, go ahead. But if you are looking to create someone reader can connect with, you cannot afford that shortcut. Why does that matter, though?
People want characters they can connect with.
Like I’ve said before, stories are one of the most uniquely human things in the entire world. Why do we read them? Why do we enjoy them so much? Why do we love it when the hero wins, the villain loses, and the day is saved? Because those are the exact same things each of us wants to see in our own life.
Stories are a kind of emulation; they are a way for a person to express hopes, dreams, and desires in a way that they may not be physically able to. A book is good when people agree that the desires of the author connect with their own.
And how does the author connect with the readers?
Through the characters.
Taking time to design is a character is crucial; if you are willing to put love and care into your character design, readers will find inspiration through them for generations.
The fact of the matter is simple: readers cannot connect with characters that don’t feel like real people. What, then, is going to make your characters seem realistic? A backstory and world view in combination with realistic goals is the trifecta of a realistic person.
Let’s use Fogram once again. Using what we already know about his backstory and life view, a realistic goal might me to help our protagonist come to peace with his own life situation.
Once you have a backstory and perspective for your character, establishing goals should be easy enough.
Alternatively, you can establish your character’s goals first, and create a proper backstory in light of this. To some degree, these first three steps are somewhat interchangeable.
4) Determine how your character desires to achieve their goals
Of all the steps in building a character, this is the one I find to be the most fun.
How does your character set about to accomplish their goals? Trickery? Kindness? Violence? Philanthropy? Oratory? Intrigue? The options are endless.
The way your character chooses to achieve their goals is largely going to determine whether your character is seen as “good” or “bad”. An evil king might use war to punish another Lord for mistreating his people. The king’s intentions might seem good, but his actions cast his name into a violent light.
A charlatan seeks to rob a family of their life savings, but does so under the guise of “financial advice”.
This disconnect between motive and actions is where a world begins to build and element of mystery or suspense.
Whether you are writing a mystery, a thriller, or even just a simple bedtime story, don’t forget to add a dash of the unknown.
5) ALWAYS refer back to the character’s traits and goals when determining how a character will act
It’s simple, but it bears repeating: whenever determining how a character will behave, ALWAYS refer back to the last four steps.
I’ve read otherwise good books that lost me at times because characters behave inconsistently. You may have a hero with no grudges and a desire to help all who suddenly, out of nowhere, goes on a violent rampage. No explanation, no backstory. Just confusion.
If you want to throw in some twist behavior for your character, just be sure to provide the proper motivation. Maybe the reader thinks they know everything about them, but doesn’t realize that there was a tragic loss in their childhood that could cause them to lash out.
Never forget: no matter how important the adventure may be, the inner, personal adventure of each character is what readers will connect with.
After reading each of these points, I hope you feel reinvigorated to design powerful, dynamic characters that readers will love to keep up with through an entire series. Who knows? Maybe in creating them, you yourself will be inspired.
About the author
Carter John Cada is the founder of and main author for Quips from the Quiver. In his free time, he loves to read, spend time with his 10 siblings, read, work out, read, work on his manuscript, read, and read.
He also enjoys eating.
