David Baldacci's Tips for Creating Memorable Characters

Here are David Baldacci’s top tips for creating compelling characters:

1. 1. Give your characters flaws. Perfect people can seem unreal and can drain tension right out of your story. Real people make mistakes. If you can make these conflicts intriguing, it will deepen your characters and will ultimately make them—and your story—more interesting.
2. 2. Your characters should have baggage. Everyone has a bad experience in their past that will affect their present. Don’t be afraid to dredge up a past mistake or trauma and explain it to the reader. It will help them understand why your characters act as they do. You don’t want to catalog every bad thing they’ve ever experienced, but focusing on the things that relate to their story now can grab and hold your reader’s interest. It can also drive your plot in interesting new directions.
3. 3. Know your characters’ motivations, and make those motivations believable. Figure out what all your characters want, even your villains. You should do this early on—it’s going to shape your whole story. Once you understand this, you’ll be able to see the world through your characters’ eyes and convey to the reader what each one sees and perceives. Whatever a character’s desires are, they should be credible. If your villain wants to blow up an entire law firm, the reader should come to understand the reasons behind it.
4. 4. Use real-world observation in developing your characters. Even if your characters are robots in a lab, you’ll still want readers to feel a connection to them somehow. David goes into the world and scrupulously observes people— what they do, how they move, what they look like, how they speak—and uses all the bits that interest him, grafting them onto each character he creates.
5. 5. Plan your character’s nadir. The “nadir” is the lowest point of the character’s fortunes—when they’ve hit rock bottom. Ask yourself: What is the worst thing that could happen to this person? Make this punch count. Your reader should feel the depth of the character’s loss.
6. 6. Your characters should change (in a positive or negative way). Characters will transform over the course of a novel (especially one packed with high tension). This is called a character arc. How characters transform will depend on who they are and the situations they face, so you’ve got to check in with them every step of the way. Maybe your character starts out a brave hero and winds up wicked, or maybe your villain turns into a saint. Let your characters lead— they’ll tell you where they want to end up.
7. 7. Not every change has to be overt, but there should be reasoning behind it. Some characters grow stronger by holding their moral position against all odds. This may lead to a more subtle or internal transformation, while not much changes in their outward behavior. However, you should not let your character go from apathetic to passionate without giving the reader a means of understanding why.
8. 8. The character’s change does not have to be slow. Sometimes a character’s transformation happens abruptly because of a shocking event. This can even happen “offstage,” or before a reader enters the storyline: David’s character Amos Decker loses his whole family in Memory Man (2015), and his whole life changes in an instant.
9. 9. The change can be in the background. In some novels, the plot is far more engaging than the character’s transformation. A lot of characters change very slowly over the course of many novels, while their plots serve to keep the reader interested. James Bond is a classic example of this.
10. 10. Flesh out your secondary characters. Sidekicks and secondary characters serve numerous important functions in a novel, but their primary purpose is to help your main character. Sidekicks usually bring some sort of alternate skill set to the table. If your protagonist is a private detective who needs access to police records, then you might give him a sidekick who works for the cops. Sidekicks can also provide comic relief, an alternate perspective, and a sounding board for your protagonist. Sometimes sidekicks can actually dislike your hero. In other cases, they can be downright confrontational and unsupportive, showing “tough love” to kick your hero when he needs it or simply acting as another obstacle the hero must overcome. No matter what type of sidekick you create, be sure to give them the same depth of character as you give to your hero. If you do this correctly, the sidekick’s story can take on a life of its own and will add another layer of interest to keep your reader hooked.
11. 11. Don’t forget about your villain. You should give your villains just as much thought as you do your protagonists. Are they bullies or assassins or simply self-serving people? Whoever they are, they should have the same complex personalities and believable motivations as your other characters. Just “being psycho” is a lazy explanation, so create a backstory for them and work out how they reached their current state. In order for your villain to feel authentic, you yourself must understand why they see the world as they do. How did they reach the point where they believe that killing someone, or terrorizing a whole population, is the right thing to do? Use your imagination and give them a belief system that’s as real as your hero’s.

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