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Developing characters is difficult. Here are the top 10 things you have to get right in order to develop great characters.

1. Characters must act naturally within the context of the story and setting.
2. Readers must be able to identify with and admire the characters.
3. The protagonist must be heroic, logical, have common sense, face complicated problems, and have worthy goals.
4. Characters need to struggle to overcome conflict. Characters that sometimes fail are easy to identify with. Conflict is the backbone of a story, so make your characters really struggle.
5. Characters should be well rounded physically, emotionally, and spiritually. If any of these three dimensions are missing the characters will feel either hollow or forced.
6. Possess universal traits such as love, hate, fear, guilt, grief, and embarrassment. Everyone possesses these traits which makes it easy to relate with and understand characters with these traits.
7. A character needs flaws. Always doing the right thing for the right reason is boring and predictable. Perfect people are easy to resent and hard to love.
8. The protagonist’s greatest weakness needs to be hammered on throughout the story. This creates both internal and external conflict and establishes the plot.
9. Never let the hero back down. Despite their weaknesses heroes always find a way to face their fears.
10. Make each character a truly unique individual. Give them quirks and provide details that give us insights into who the characters really are.

If you wonder how well you have developed your characters please join our writing community and let us critique your work.

Jacob

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Tags: Character development, Improve Your Writing

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 5th, 2008 at 9:58 am and is filed under How To, Write, Writing Tools. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.