The Physical Characteristics Of Great Characters In Fiction

The physical characteristics of a character is something that every writer nearly gets, because it is a requirement for a reader to have some image in their head of what your character looks like.



But simply stating some baseline physical characteristics of your character will not cut it. What I want to know is what makes them aesthetically unique. What makes them stand out?

In my last review of Michael Redhill’s Bellevue Square, I talked about just that. When we’re introduced to Jean’s step mother, we get this detail: “Beatrice’s tongue is pinned to the floor of her mouth owing to some childhood incident involving a pencil, so you only ever see the pristine pink tip of it.”

That’s what I’m talking about when I think of great physical characteristics that make that character stand out and yell at the reader, “HELLO! I’M A REAL PERSON OUT WHO EXISTS OUT IN THE REAL WORLD!”

After a detail like that, I’m hooked, I’m in, and I’m listening. My brain knows what I’m reading is fiction, but at the same time, a physical detail like that allows me to suspend my belief for the time being, because you’ve sold me on the reality of the character.

So when you’re writing your short story or novel or novella, ask yourself: what’s something about this character that makes them wholly unique? Maybe they have a lazy eye, cauliflower ears, one eyebrow that’s slightly higher than the other or an arm that’s shorter due to a head on collision with a bus that snapped their collar bone in two.

Explore them and understand them, even if you’re not going to relay that information to your reader.

A big part of this exercise is that you, the author, understands what makes your character unique.

Distinct Voice - What Do Your Characters Sound Like?

While writing my upcoming novel, What We Do On Weekends, I started to notice that my main character and the main supporting character’s voice would meld together. This was a problem because they weren’t anything alike.

That’s when I asked myself what do they sound like? Who do they sound like? And I usedthree to four words to describe their speech patterns, vocabulary, and intellectual capacity. I then found about five reference novels and movies which I thought they might sound like.

From there, I wrote down lines or quotes that I thought my character might say, or could have the capacity to say, from which to differentiate the two. After that I believe I had a solid grasp on how my characters sound and how to make them both distinct.

This felt worthwhile enough to me to then do describe each of my character’s voices, no matter how big or small a part they played (except for reading and watching five reference pieces). I wanted to keep myself mentally in check for their voice and make sure I wasn’t veering into my own writerly voice.

What’s also interesting is that while doing this exercise, I started to see my characters more clearly in my mind’s eye. I could now, without much effort, see their physical movements and unique mannerisms when they talked. It was an interesting and worthwhile experiment to complete.

If nothing else, I would recommend it for your main character and first supporting character.

Habits - What Do They Do When The Reader Isn’t Looking?

These are the little things that your character does when the reader isn’t watching (and some when the reader is) that make them a fully formed, functional human—even if they’re not. This includes what the character likes to watch on television, how (and why) they’ve decided to decorate their home, how they walk, if they brush their teeth once, twice, or never, what they eat for dinner, if they make their bed in the morning and so on.

It’s the small idiosyncrasies of your character that make a reader stop and go intuitively “oh, I’m reading about a real person who did real things” even when their logic is telling them that that isn’t true. It’s allowing them to take a moment to suspend their believe and believe the author.

What you want these habits—strategically revealed (or not revealed) to the reader—to show is who the character really is. Are they messy? Then they don’t do their dishes. Are they excessively particular? Then perhaps they organize their clothing by colour, fabric, and type. Are they angry? Maybe there’s holes in the wall of their apartment.

What you’re trying to do is show the reader who your character is without telling them. That’s effective characterization.

What Does Your Character Want? What Do they Need?

This is probably the most important aspect of understanding your character. Every single person, real or fictional, has both a want and a need in their life. On a micro level, I, at the moment I’m writing this, want some ice cream. But I need to abstain from sugar, finish this article, and go to bed.

At the beginning of your story, your character’s wants should be apparent, but the need should be the driving force of your story. A character might want to find out who killed their brother, but they need to find redemption or closure over the death of a loved one.

Understanding both your character’s need and want is crucial to understanding both your story and your character.

But it’s not just your main character who has a need and a want. In It’s A Long Way Down, my debut novel, I wrote below each character’s name, whether they were in the novel for a page, or ten or twenty, both what they wanted and needed.

I wanted to understand what each character, underneath what they saying on the surface, were really getting at. I wanted to know what script that character handed to them (which reminds me of that scene from Synecdoche, New York where Caden says “every person is a character in their own play”).

A Word On A Character’s Dialogue

I was reading Sol Stein’s Stein On Writing and he brought up an interesting dialogue exercise from “Inside The Actor’s Studio.” During a rehearsal, actors would be given two separate scripts with different lines of dialogue on it. Often, you’d get a conversation that mirrored real life more than if you gave them the same script.

In a way that’s how you should approach your characters. When we’re having a conversation in real life, we’re two people with two different scripts in our heads. We don’t have the same goal in mind, which is often the case by the novice writer. They’re trying to steer the conversation into a single direction with a single outcome, but characters (and people) don’t converse like that.

Ask yourself what your character is trying to accomplish by what they’re trying to say. Make them agents of their own futures, with their own thoughts, desires, needs, and wants.

Exercises To Explore Your Characters

I generally don’t find “exercises” in any other part of writing particularly useful, except when it comes to understanding the full depths of your characters. That’s probably because a lot of what makes a character real will never make it onto the page, but it’s work that is necessary for you, the author, to understand them fully and reveal the pieces of them that do matter with a skilled, delicate hand.



Here are some of my favourites:

