How to quickly define your characters

I’ve been experimenting with a useful technique for quickly creating characters, borrowing a few tricks from roleplaying games. I started using this approach with The Mechanical Crown, as the book is crammed full of characters and I needed a way to immediately define their behaviour, speech pattern and attitudes.

Photo by Mario Purisic on Unsplash

Previously I’ve concentrated on backstory and motivation to define characters. When those two things collide with the story setting, that’s when you get the emergence of interesting characters. The amount of detail in a character’s backstory can vary and while it informs where they’re coming from, it doesn’t always illuminate where they are right now. Two characters can have very similar backstories but end up being very different people, just as twins with a similar upbringing still develop distinct personalities.

When I was writing A Day of Faces I tended to explore the characters as I went along, uncovering their richness as I went. This worked because ADoF has a relatively small cast, but even then I recognised that my serialised, weekly publishing approach required something more immediate. To achieve character consistency I needed something to help me get inside a character’s head more quickly.