Characters are the heart of a story and even the best plot can’t make up for lacklustre characters. On several occasions I dropped a series, sometimes in the last season, or stopped reading a book, because I didn’t care about what would happen to the characters. As a writer, I want the same: to get to know my characters well enough to understand what makes them tick and to care about what happens to them in the story. Yes, that means the bad ones, too.

The easiest way for the reader to connect with a character is for them to be allowed to hear the character’s thoughts, see their flaws and learn about their dreams and fears. It’s the author’s job to dig those out and reveal them throughout the story. The key to creating engaging characters is not to make them likeable or to agree with their life choices, but to understand why they made those choices. For example, when I started to write a story about a food influencer whose life took a turn for the worse, I’d initially wanted to have some fun with the duplicity of social media and how they rarely reflect real life.

As I was writing, I observed the main character’s seemingly unreasonable behaviour, I wanted to understand why she acted the way she did and what she was after. The answer not only made me sympathise with her, but it also changed the way the story unfolded.

While the characters aren’t real in the corporeal sense, they must feel real. Readers can be unforgiving about poorly developed characters. They’ll drop the story, write an upset review and sometimes drop the author altogether. A well-developed character, on the other hand, can make the reader forgive other oversights or shortcomings of the story. That’s not to say that developing characters is an excuse not to develop the rest of the story. In my experience, if you do the former, the latter will happen almost organically.

To be clear, that doesn’t mean that you need to excuse or justify your character’s behaviour, especially if they’re misbehaving, but it helps to know who they are and this usually requires some digging into their past, wants, and fears. In the end, readers will judge your characters more by how they act than by what you tell them about them.

How to go about doing all that, then?

There are different methods and approaches to creating a character. Some authors set up detailed spreadsheets and outline the character’s features, habits, fears, personal history and family tree before they begin writing the story. Some start by planning the character’s arc, starting from the beginning, outlining the character’s misbeliefs, fears and hopes, then charting out their journey and how those are going to change towards the end of the story.

I’ve tried both of these methods and while they can work, and do work for many, they didn’t work for me. My love of spreadsheets aside, I couldn’t bring my characters to act anything like the people I’d detailed in those templates. The people I’d created in the spreadsheet acted differently from those who showed up in the story. Their goals changed, their habits changed, sometimes the colour of their eyes changed, too, and don’t get me started with the names. In other words, when put in a scene, the characters acted in ways I hadn’t predicted. So, I flipped the process and started developing characters on the page first and filling out the spreadsheet afterwards. This worked like a charm and led me to develop a bunch of writing exercises that I’m still using today.

Try them out and let me know how they worked for you. They’re based on writing loose scenes that are geared towards nudging your character in different directions and see how they’ll react. I encourage you to do some of them for all of your characters, the villains and the side characters, too. While those scenes might not end up in your story, they’ll give you additional bits of information. I can’t tell you how many times doing these exercises resulted in fresh ideas for my plots.

Exercise 1: Travel into the character’s past and write down one of the most embarrassing moments in their childhood. Linger for details and see if you can understand how this influenced the character’s life.

Exercise 2: Your character witnesses a crime. How do they react? You decide whether it’s something minor or a big thing, where it happens, and whether they try to prevent/report it or are too paralysed to act.

Exercise 3: What was the one situation in your character’s life they would have liked to change? What happened and what would they change? Write up both scenes.

Exercise 4: Your character is the last customer in the bar and the waiter has just messed up their order and brought them something else. How do they react? Write up the scene, starting with the character coming into the bar and moving on to what happens after their reaction to the wrong order.

Exercise 5: Your character has bought tickets to a movie they want to see (alone or with friends) when an old friend they haven’t heard from in ages calls them and tells them they’re in trouble. Do they stay and listen or do they say ‘Sorry, have to be somewhere.’Whatever their decision, write up the whole scene, including what the character thinks and says: the two might be different.

Writing these scenes as opposed to filling out an information sheet will give you an idea what kind of imaginary people you’ve created and what makes them tick. You might be tempted to cut the exercises short and jump straight to the spreadsheet. Don’t. As tempting as they are, spreadsheets won’t save you any time, and neither will answering the questions above instead of writing the full scenes. Some shortcuts are just not worth taking.

For more exercises about how to lure your characters out of their shells, sign up for updates and get a free copy of ‘Grow your story’.