15 Tips to Create Good Characters in Your Stories

A great story is not enough for a great book.

A great book needs both —a great story and great characters. If you have an interesting lead character but he’s never challenged by the plot, the reader will get bored quickly.

A character may start passive, but don’t let him stay like that for too long.

Successful writing creates an emotional response in the reader. So create a characters that the user can really relate to or that is very likable, or just makes the reader hate his guts.

What makes characters truly memorable?

1. It has to fight

It has to have the strength to carry the story to the end. A character cannot be weak, then he can’t support a play.

2. Unpredictability

E.M. Forster describes 2 types of characters in his book Aspects of the Novel (1927) — flat and round characters. Flat characters are those you can describe in one sentence and do not change throughout the story. Round characters in turn are complex and undergo development, they need to surprise the reader in a convincing manner. At the end of the book they aren’t the same person they were at the start.