What Makes a Memorable Character

One of the most important aspects of your story is your characters. You want to create characters who stay with readers long after they finish the story. You can achieve this through complexity, contradictions, and emotional depth. You might highlight common traits of unforgettable protagonists, antagonists, and side characters.

[Try making a character you love to despise, give them a page of dialogue and describe them in less than 100 words]

[Uncover who your character TRULY is. Not what they look like or their goal in the story. Tell me what makes them who they are! – Instead of “they have to save their family, super angry, etc.” tell me “they never understood why everyone trusted them so easily, the faith made them slowly lose trust in humanity.”]

Building Your Character’s Backstory

Here you want to uncover the key moments, relationships, and wounds that shaped your characters before page one even started. First you need to focus on choosing details for the backstory that matter and how to reveal them naturally throughout the narrative.

[The details don’t all need to be complete; give us some unknown past story referenced with a display of an emotion; it builds suspense]

[Start with what you want to matter, what emotion or fear the character has “built up over time”]

Character Motivation & Goals

Use this to clarify what your characters want, why they want it, and what they’re willing to risk to get it. You can explore internal versus external goals, stakes, and how strong motivation fuels tension and plot.

[This can be completed at the same time as the above]

Character Voice & Dialogue

Each character should feel like its own person; they should have a distinct way of speaking and thinking. This can be done with word choice, rhythm, subtext, and revealing personality, background, and emotion through dialogue.

[Not every character should feel like a different version of you. If you were to take away dialogue tags and names in the text, could you tell who was speaking or acting based on their distinct personality?]

Character Arc

The next step is shaping the journey of change (or steadfastness) your characters experience from beginning to end. You might explore positive, negative, and flat arcs, as well as how inner transformation connects to the plot.

[Now you should have some notable Arcs, but some might still be building. Here you have to be cautious. No one wants to start with book one and not find a single arc. Maybe the characters have what seems to be a predictable arc, but later on it’s just part of a larger picture change they are still undergoing]

Growth arc

Redemption arc

Steadfast hero (flat arc)

Corruption arc (the fall)

Disillusionment arc