David Farland’s Writing Tips – Twelve Exercises for Developing Characters

Use these exercises for writing and developing your characters, and you will write even stronger stories. David Farland was a best-selling author and contest judge for the world’s largest short story competition.

There are a lot of exercises that can help you create and develop characters. Most of them simply force you to focus on your character and stretch your imagination in some way by answering questions about the characters. These questions might touch upon the outer looks of the character, the character’s history,
the character family and contacts, or the character’s inner hopes and fears. But creating characters for
fantasy and science fiction worlds offers extra challenges. Here are a few exercises that I’ve found
helpful:

1. 1. Tie your character to the world that you’re creating. Where was your character born, raised, and educated? What places has he or she visited? If you’re creating an alternate world, what interesting this might he or she have experienced that would affect the character?
   2. Tie your character through others through relationships. Who are your characters parents, siblings, cousins, friends from school or from the neighborhood, and so on. This is particularly important for protagonists and love interests. One way that readers know whether to like your characters is by the wealth of and depth of their friendships.
   3. Answer the most fundamental questions about your character’s inner self. What does he want more than anything in the world? What does he need, even though he might not want it? This will tell you what his quest for the novel might be. What is his greatest fear? (He will have to face it.) What is he secretly ashamed of having done in the past?
   4. Create an inner mindscape for your character. What are his hobbies? What does he think about when he has nothing else to think about? What does he hope he might want to do someday? If he is single, what does he imagine that he wants in a mate? In a fantasy world, this list of wants might include such things as “What does he want in the way of a horse? A hunting dog? Or a perfect sword?”
   5. Create a character your reader will bond with. Ask yourself what you can do to make your character someone that you reader will sympathize with? In other words, what virtues does your character possess? (He might be patient, honest, generous, etc. But you need to realize that such things will need to be portrayed early on.) What great pain has he gone through? (I’m talking about emotional pains. Everyone has scars. We sympathize better with people who have gone through things that are really terrible.) What “secret powers” does your character have? By secret powers, I mean exceptional powers or abilities such as intelligence, the ability to perceive a lie, unwavering determination, and so on. These are unusual traits that makes others admire your character to the point that they “want to be” that character. The audience wants to see the value of those traits enough so that they actually fully bond with the character and put themselves in the character’s place.
   6. Define your character’s growth pattern. Looking at your character, consider what state he is in now, and what he will become by the end. This describes his growth-cycle. These should be one-word descriptions.
      For example: Orphan→Wanderer→Warrior→King. Do you see how each state not only describes what the character is, but also shows a path that he is taking? Your path could be just about anything: Killer→Penitent→Prisoner→Priest. Or: Free Man→Slave→Acolyte →Wizard.
   7. Try using the “Casting Director’s Method for Creating Characters.” Imagine that you’re casting a novel, and you’ve put out ads. Several people have responded to the ads, and you go into a room in your imagination and “look them over.” Each one is wrong for the part, but each has his or her own interesting points. Consider using the “wrong character” for the job.
   8. As you create your characters, try making them in pairs. For example, develop the hero and the protagonist together, and then develop a guardian and a contagonist at the same time. Put the sidekick and the heckler together, and both the true love and the temptress. Once you create such pairs, consider how they might be “foils” to one another, characters that set each other off. Create gads between them and other characters, those little annoying habits or traits that really set each other off. But also create circuitry between them, which may be ways that set each other off in good ways. For example, in creating circuitry, I might say, “When my protagonist John sees his wife doing dishes, he automatically helps in order to show how much he loves her. She shows her affection later on when they go to bed.
   9. Create a unique voice for your character. Think about what kind of accent he might have, the way that he might phrase his words, the extent of his vocabulary, metaphors that he might use, and so on. Try writing a few paragraphs from that character’s voice. As you do, keep pushing the envelope, until you are no long writing “like you.”
   10. Try “interviewing” your character. This is a technique that helps you refine the character and fill him or her out. Simply do this: imagine that you are in the room with the character, that you’re an interviewer writing about his life, and then ask him/her the first questions that pop into your mind. For example, my first question is “How old were you when your older brother drowned?” Now, I hadn’t known that my character had a brother until now. That’s a relationship that just formed. But my character answers, “I was only three, and he was five. We were playing by the pond when he slipped on a rock, fell in the water, and got caught under the branch of a sunken tree. I didn’t understand what was happening. I laughed because of the funny faces he was making. . .” This might sound a bit crazy, but it can yield some interesting results.
   11. Create an exterior body for your character. Consider creating a character sketch by using Mark McCutchons’ BUILDING BELIEVABLE CHARACTERS. In creating a body, I don’t just look at the character’s exterior, I like to go through and create a medical history, too. But have you noticed how I’ve left this step near the end? The way that your character looks is far less important than all of the other stuff, at least in novels.
   12. Look for ways to make your characters unique. This means that you might look for way to make your character quirky and unpredictable, particularly in how they act. A very off-the-wall response to a problem will work if it is properly motivated, but you can also make characters unpredictable by giving them very complex responses to situations.