Take a walk with your character

You’ve created the perfect character, or so you thought. You’ve done your homework. You’ve given her a past, an outlook on life and you know what drives her. You’ve got her physiological details down so well that you can rattle off her height, weight, body type and exact location of any scars without referring back to your notes. But no matter what you try, when you’re writing her, she comes of as flat and a bit two dimensional.

I’m not talking about a character who keeps baffling you with trying to do her own thing. That is an entirely different (and very good) thing to have happen. This character follows along with what you tell her to do complacently. She blindly follows orders and emotes and interacts with characters like a low paid extra on a television serial. She’s got no soul.

In How to Write a Damned Good Novel James N Frey describes his method for getting to know your characters. His method is to write a journal entry. From the way I understood it, he was asking the character to introduce themselves and then tell their own story in their own way.

Not a bad thing at all… Too bad it doesn’t work for me. the rest of his advice is priceless, and I’m sure that method of character building works for other people, but it hasn’t for me.

My version is similar I suppose. But what I prefer to do is to get inside the character in a different way. To make a character come to life on the page you’ve got to have a very real handle on what makes her tick. You have to know exactly why she reacts the way she does, or you’ll never be able to describe it to your reader. As such, you’ll end up with a character who’s got about as much substance as a “blue-shirt” in a space-opera. Not what I’d call engrossing. Entertaining maybe, but not someone you’re going to really want to follow along on the page with. (Though you may choose to kill her off in the first three minutes of the book, it worked for Gene Roddenberry when he was writing for Star Trek.)

*note: My own advice about having your facts traight in my previous post was broken in the original version of this one. I had mistakenly stated that Piers Anthony had written for Star Trek, he never did. (I was writing a disparate piece that mentioned him, must’ve slipped in from there. Apologies!)*

My method… I just take a walk with the character. It’s simple really. Just have her walk down a street that you know well and take in the scenery, the people, the action.

The street you walk the character down doesn’t matter. It can be any street anywhere in the world. But it should be one that you’re familiar with. It can be the walk from the bus (lorry, tram, train) to your front door. You know, that walk you take so often that you take everything you see for granted.

I’m sure you’ll see that walk in a whole different way once you take it through the eyes of your character. You’ll find that she notices different things in different ways. That she has emotional reactions based on that lovely rich history you’ve given her. She may have feelings based on her physical abilities, religious affiliation or ethnic background.

An upscale business woman from Manhattan isn’t going to have the same view of a small town Texas Street as I do. I find it quaint, charming and endearing. Would she? I doubt it.

I hope this has given you a new avenue for getting in to the minds of your characters. They are, after all, the reason someone is going to read your story in the first place.

Now, go take a walk!

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