The Trendsetter

Other than a great plot, the characters are the ones who are responsible to move the plot forward. In my previous entry Where do you get ideas for your characters, I suggested to looks at your friends and list them down to find out if they can become potential characters. They’re one of the best sources as characters. Now, that you have your characters ready to get into action, you need to create them in such away that they are credible or believable.

The question is how do you make your characters believable? When I started writing fiction, I asked myself the same question. Since one of my primary interests when majoring in psychology is personality, I had learned how personality develops from birth to adulthood. Armed with this knowledge, I used Personality Psychology to guide me to create credible and believable characters.

You can find the introduction of Personality Psychology at Wikipedia. It is described as:

Personality can be defined as a dynamic and organized set of characteristics possessed by a person that uniquely influences his or her cognitions, motivations, and behaviors in various situations (Ryckman, 2004). The word “personality” originates from the Greek persona, which means mask. Significantly, in the theatre of the ancient Latin-speaking world, the mask was not used as a plot device to disguise the identity of a character, but rather was a convention employed to represent or typify that character.

You don’t have to have a degree in psychology to develop your characters that your readers can become attached. There are many books out there that help you to get started. One of them is Writer’s Guide to Character Traits by Linda N. Edelstein, Ph.D. which profiles human behaviors and personality types.

Now that you have created a personality profile for your characters it is time to put them into action. This is the most difficult yet most interesting part of being a writer. Your next task is to apply the technical parts of the novel’s elements to weave these characters and their personalities in such way that holds your reader’s fascination. How do you do this? In real life, someone with personality Type A is just that, but in fiction, you can create your character with a Type A personality and clash it with other characters who are say a Type B personality and it just happens that these two characters are your main characters. You can start to build how the characters differ in personality create conflict that will move the plot forward.

The conflict between your two main characters that have two different personalities can be shown through the exchange of dialogue, action, decision making and so on. Your reader will appreciate it since they can relate to the characters’ personality and the action they undertake. Your main goal is to give your reader an experience that they will remember through your characters.

Applying some simple aspects of Personality Psychology is one way to create believable characters and you need to take the entire element of fiction writing to make your plot interesting and establish credibility via the character’s that propel the plot.