Do You Know Your Characters?

“A writer should create living people; people, not characters.  A character is a caricature.”
Ernest Hemingway

I was watching an interview today with Ricky Gervais, the guy who came up with the idea for The Office, and they were asking him how he did it. He said that comedy isn’t about joke after joke after joke. He basically said the jokes don’t necessarily matter. It’s character that makes a show funny. And I think that’s true for any sort of story or situation you’re trying to portray. Whether it’s a show, a novel, a short story, a movie – it doesn’t matter. Character makes everything. If you don’t have good character development, nothing you write will be believable.

So, I went digging around to find my ‘character questionnaire’ that a good friend gave me a while back. I’d like to share this basic list with you to see if you really know your characters and if they’re realistic and are selling your story…making it what it should be.

You should know more about your characters than you ever tell your readers. You need to be aware of every little thing about them and what motivates them to do and say the things they do. If you have good character and world development, you just might have a great story!

Here are the little things you definitely have to know about your characters, even if only your main ones, in order to make them believable. If I read your story, I don’t want to be told all these things, but I do want to be able to possibly imagine and figure them all out on my own. Because I’ve been sucked in by your great characterization and story-telling and I want to know everything about the super-interesting people of whose lives I’m reading.

These are just some of the main ones. But if you can’t answer all these about your protagonist, at least, then you have some work to do!

Name
Age
Job/Grade
Religion
Residence
Who S/he Lives With
Socioeconomic Status
Car
Pets
Interests/Hobbies
Favorite Color
Favorite Food
Favorite Music
Favorite Books
Hair Color
Eye Color
Ethnicity
Clothing Style
Temperament
Vices
Strengths
Phobias
Pet Peeves
Secrets

Do you get the picture? I don’t want to list them all…this is just the beginning and the list is really long. This was just to get you thinking. To see if your characters are as well-developed as they should be. Because without character, you have nothing….

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