Characters: An Itch of Writing Guide

How to find them, how to develop them and everything else you need to think about

Fiction and creative non-fiction can’t do without people, or avatars of people such as rabbits: stories are made of them. Aristotle said it first, in the Poetics, which is about drama - stories told using humans and their experience - rather than lyric poetry as you might expect:

While character makes men what they are, it’s their actions and experiences that make them happy or the opposite. They do not therefore act to represent character, but character-study is included for the sake of the action. It follows that the incidents and the plot are the end at which tragedy aims.

In other words, it is characters who carry the story, but the most important thing about them is that they do things: they act. Yes, the chain of cause-and-effect (‘the incidents and the plot’) which constitutes the story is partly formed and conditioned by the nature of the act-ors in it. And because the characters are to some extent the reader’s representative in the story, who your important characters are is fundamental to our experience of the story you’re telling. Talk to many readers, and it’s the characters - the people - who stay with them over the years. So this post explores how to choose and develop your characters, and the other questions which most often arise.

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