One Stop Shop for Writing Inspiration: Main Characters

Next to the plot, main characters are the most important part of the story. If you don’t have main characters in your story you’re screwed because I don’t know what the heck you’re doing, but it’s not writing a story. Even if you do have main characters, the safe zone is still far away. Just being there is not enough to substance them. They need to transform from the page to life when the reader begins their journey. So you are ready to begin bringing those two star crossed lovers and broken hearted characters to life? Well, there are a few things to follow when doing so.

Dimensional Characters

If a main character is only one-dimensional it will never escape the confides of the page and be tangible. For the reader it would be like glancing at a stranger in the crowd. No one cares about a passerby. You have seen a movie where the character is running through the crowd and bumps into a person. That person doesn’t care who you are or what you’re doing, they just care about the coffee or papers you just made them drop.

Example:
Let’s call your main character Alice. If all the reader knows about Alice throughout.the whole story is that she is obsessed with always wearing a pink ribbon in her hair, has an alcoholic father, and her best friend is a cat named Susie then she is nothing short of one-dimensional.

As the writer, you want and must have Alice be three-dimensional or round. Who are you to tell me Alice must be three-dimensional? I’m not telling you anything but if you want Alice to be realistic—she will be. When Alice becomes multidimensional the reader will be able to feel and relate to her. She will no longer be a stranger but a friend we seek out in a crowd to save and protect. Alice will be what the reader continues to read for. She is the drug and they are the addicts.

Example:
One-dimensional Alice can be transformed into three-dimensional Alice by building on what the reader already knows. Alice always wears a pink ribbon in her hair because she lost her mom to breast cancer. Her father is an alcoholic because he can’t deal with his wife’s death. Susie wasn’t always Alice’s only friend. She had plenty before cancer claimed her mom’s life. She pushed them all away not.wanting to feel the pain of losing someone again.

Motivation / Back-Story

If Alice didn’t have a motivation for her behavior, wouldn’t that defeat the whole purpose of her being alive to the reader? Everyone in the world has a motivation or back story to as why they are who they are. We could paint Alice as a selfish mean girl but what would be her motivation, her mother dying? No. Her personality must fit her back story. If we paint Alice as either a guarded girl or strongly independent, her motivation would fit her personality. She’s guarded due to losing the person she cared for the most in the world and she must be independent because she can’t rely on her drunken dad to support her. As we give her a motivation, Alice becomes even more dimensional.

Back stories should never be given in large meaty chunks. Instead give a nice wine tasting every now and then. By given glimpses into Alice’s back story the reader slowly begins to build the strong connection rather than throwing a glob of information that doesn’t designate with them.