How to Develop a Fictional Character: 6 Tips for Writing Great Characters

In fiction writing, character development is the process of building a unique, three-dimensional character with depth, personality, and clear motivations. Character development can also refer to the changes a character undergoes over the course of a story as a result of their actions and experiences.

A novel consists of a character interacting with events over time. Character and plot are inseparable, because a person is what happens to them. Without a clear sense of who a character is, what they value, and what they’re afraid of, the reader will be unable to appreciate the significance of your events, and your story will have no impact.

Like real people, fictional characters have hobbies, pets, histories, ruminations, and obsessions. These characteristics inform how a character reacts to and feels about the things that happen to them. It’s essential to your novel that you understand all aspects of your characters so that you are equipped to understand how they may react under the pressures of events they encounter.

Your main character’s goal sets the stakes in your story. It doesn’t matter whether your story stakes are big or small, as long as they matter deeply to your protagonist.

Your character doesn’t have to save the world: perhaps they are trying to save their family from an eviction, or fighting to keep their business from going bankrupt. Your job is to establish what’s important to your character (ideally, it’s something that your audience can relate to), and help the reader imagine what might happen if they lose that important thing.

Stories have different kinds of characters. Every story has a main character, called the hero or protagonist. Many stories have a bad guy: the villain or antagonist. Secondary characters round out the story. These characters may help the main characters, oppose them, or be completely neutral, so long as they help the reader understand the protagonist or antagonist in deeper ways.

Some guidelines for developing a protagonist include:

• Give the protagonist flaws. Protagonists or heroes don’t have to be perfect specimens of humanity. In fact, those protagonists tend to be boring. Great characters emerge from the trials they encounter, and believable characters have human flaws, just like people in real life.
• Give the protagonist an arc. A good character undergoes some sort of change over the course of the story. That change is called the character arc. You can also choose to create a main character who doesn’t change, but that decision should be intentional.

Some guidelines for developing an antagonist include:

• Give the antagonist morality. A villain’s motivations should create a crisis for your protagonist. Every villain needs to have their own morality, however warped. If a villain spends part of the novel killing people, you need to give him or her believable reasons for doing so. Make the reader understand exactly what desperate need or twisted belief has driven the villain to commit their crimes, and make those motivations personal to their history and upbringing.
• Make the antagonist powerful. Readers want to see your main character succeed—but they don’t want it to be easy. Your villain should not only be a match for your hero: they should be even more powerful. This forces your protagonist to collect the skills, items, and allies they’ll need to defeat your antagonist, which creates further opportunity for character development.

Some guidelines for developing secondary characters include:

• Make them complementary. Secondary characters serve the vital functions of assisting the protagonist with alternate skill sets, giving them a sounding board or emotional support, getting themselves into trouble so that the protagonist can help them, and even providing comic relief.
• Make them oppositional. Some of the best sidekicks in literature are oppositional, and will even undermine the protagonist. Think of Dr. Watson chastising Sherlock Holmes for his drug use. Giving secondary characters opposing points of view allows you to explore your subjects, settings, and moral gray areas from a wider variety of perspectives, which sustains complexity and keeps the reader interested.

Characters, like people, are imperfect. They don’t need to be likeable, but they must be interesting. Here are some tips for effective character development.

1. 1. Develop characters who reflect your interests. You’re going to be spending a lot of time with your characters, so the fiction rule “write what you want to know” applies to them as well. Don’t be afraid to invest your protagonist with familiar qualities, but prioritize your passions and make sure that your main characters emerge from the setting and topics you’ve developed so far.
2. 2. Reveal their physical world through detail. Different writers focus on different details to evoke character, whether deliberately or not. Balzac focused on his characters’ physical appearance. Dashiell Hammett never fed his characters, while Charles Dickens fed his extravagantly. Some writers are interested in revealing character via clothing, as Flaubert did, while others attend to mannerisms or physical appearance. Whatever details you choose, it’s important for you to know your characters' physical world intimately, and how they relate to it.
3. 3. Give them the right skills. Your characters should have skills that will allow them to function in your setting. If you’ve chosen to set your novel on the moon, then make sure your character has a space suit or learns how to use one.
4. 4. Create memorable characters. When creating important characters that the reader is going to meet more than once, be sure that they’re memorable in some way. Try to give each one a quirk or quality that can be used later to help readers recall who they are. This could be a title like “chief of police” or a physical attribute like “ginger-haired.”
5. 5. Give the reader access to their inner conflict. One way to create intimacy with your reader—and to get them to care about your main character—is to use internal monologue. This means letting the reader see a character’s thoughts as they happen, which exposes that person’s inner conflict, motivations, opinions, and personality. Internal monologue not only reveals character: it’s a neat way to convey information about your setting, events, and other characters.
6. 6. Subvert your reader’s expectations. The most interesting characters will surprise your readers. Think about it: We don’t have to pay attention to things that are stable. But when something unexpected happens—a wolf comes out of the woods, for instance—we pay attention.

Use these questions to develop your characters, and learn how they behave. If you’re working on a novel, you can use this questionnaire with your protagonist or any secondary character to learn more about their present state, enrich their backstory, and add to their repertoire of unique gestures and habits.

• What is your character’s name?
• What is their gender (at the moment)?
• When is their birthday? What is their age at the beginning of the novel?
• What do they look like?
• What is their general disposition? Are they frowny? Or are they smiley?
• Where do they live?
• What do they eat?
• How do they dress?
• Do they dress to impress?
• Do they dress in a way that is appropriate for their age, or do they dress to look younger or older than they are?
• What major experiences have they had in their lives?
• Have they had any traumatic experiences?
• Did they have a bad childhood?
• Or did they have a good childhood suddenly destroyed by a traumatic event?
• What are their ruminations?
• Do they have any obsessions?
• Are they in love?
• Do they have any pets?
• Do they have any medical conditions?
• What do they like to do in their spare time? (Do they have any spare time?)
• What are their friends like?
• What are their hobbies?
• What they are most embarrassed by?
• Where they went on their first date? (And with whom?)

Choose one of your characters and write a one-page description of them. Use the following tips
to flesh out your description:

• Instead of writing a plain, physical description, try viewing the character through a creative lens. For example, does she have a nickname? What did she do to earn it? Does it refer to her appearance? Her attitude? How does she feel about it?
• Choose one event from your character’s past and elaborate on that. For example, your hero has a back injury from an accident while he was in the navy. Does he move differently now? Do people treat him differently? What are the psychological repercussions of the accident?
• Choose one of your main character’s personality traits and list the ways that it’s expressed. If your sidekick is nervous, he might bounce his knee when he’s sitting, pluck at his sleeves, or startle easily.
• What space has your character created for themselves? This can be offstage: a bedroom, an expensive car with all the right gadgets, the perfectly-stocked kitchen, a private office. Describe your character in that space.

Go to a public place where you can observe other people. Choose one person and imagine a few character details for them. What’s their name? What mood are they in? Why are they there? Write a one-page, interior monologue for them that reveals what they’re thinking.

Use first person, even if you typically write in third person. Show their thoughts, but also show the world around them and how they interact with that world. Try to develop an inner monologue that is at odds with the world around them or with the way they appear to be.

Whether you’re creating a story as an artistic exercise or trying to get the attention of publishing houses, character development is essential to good writing. Award-winning author Judy Blume has spent decades honing her craft. In Judy Blume’s MasterClass on writing, she provides insight into how to invent vivid characters, write realistic dialogue, and turn your experiences into stories people will treasure.

Want to become a better writer? The MasterClass Annual Membership provides exclusive video lessons on plot, character development, creating suspense, and more, all taught by literary masters, including Judy Blume, Neil Gaiman, Dan Brown, Margaret Atwood, David Baldacci, and more.