How I Design Characters to Help Me Sell More Fiction

Craft compelling characters, memorable dialogue, and design better stories so that publishers and readers crave your writing.

Characters are the actors of your story. They are the people, places, or things that fill your story and act out what you wish to take place.

But for me, characters are my friends, neighbors, enemies, lovers, and strangers who wander around my head. They are apart of me and I carry them with me when I am working on a project. From my experience, I know that I see character different than most writers.

But not different than most readers. That’s because like most successful writers, I was a reader before I was a writer. Words stole me away and held me.

That type of captivation is what I aim to create in my own writing. It is how I approach thinking about my characters. Because I was a reader before I was a writer, I want to share my techniques and those of others to help you create better fiction, nonfiction, or poetry.

There are different types and kinds of characters that are all worthwhile and useful when it comes to crafting or designing a character. I’ll list them with their definitions and uses below, but do not take this as an exhaustive list. Search out and find new types of characters and forms of them by reading and consuming story widely.

The main distinction between a type of character and a kind of character has to do with their function. A type of character serves a plot function while a kind of character serves a story function. Consider it like this: A hero(kind) can be a main character(type), but they can also be a background or side character(type).

When I dive in to my pieces, I don’t directly think about what type or kind of characters I am writing. I focus on the story, but I’ve studied writing and characters for so long, I intuitively know where my characters fit. I got to this point by studying story and characters before writing my stories. Even now, before I start writing a new piece, I do a refresher in mechanics, publishing, reader interest, etc.

Related posts:

The above was an excerpt from Hiut Denim Co. — YearBook 2. We only printed 2000. They have all sold out. But you can get a free digital version of YearBook 1 when you sign up for our newsletter here.

How do you make money on testnets? How to make money on different kinds of testnets Every new project needs to be carefully tested and checked for flaws. Normal projects hire testers for this Q&A…

WordPress is the most popular content management systems in the world, as it powers over 30% of the websites on the Internet. Whether it is a blogger or a photographer, WordPress website design comes…