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Your characters may be fictional, but they’d better feel real, or your readers won’t buy them. So it’s time to do your story a favor and spend some time developing them.
If the idea of spending time on this makes you groan, don’t worry. There are ways to have some fun in the process, and that’s where character development exercises come in.
Why should writers use character development exercises?
You may be wondering why character development exercises are important. Here are just a few of the ways it can help your story.
You can practice capturing your character’s voice. By the time you get to writing your story, you’ll know your character’s voice well, so you won’t have to figure it out as you go along. You can also get practice with your character’s body language, mannerisms, and habits. Making your character distinctive is important, and development exercises can help you define those distinctive elements about them.
You can see your characters in action. Your characters may feel like abstract concepts in your mind until you actually see them making moves. Make them feel more real and get a glimpse of how they behave in real life through your exercises.
You’ll flesh out your characters so they feel real to your reader. Underdeveloped characters fall flat on the page. If you want your characters to pop, feel real, and be relatable, you’ll need to build details for who your character is as a person. You may even need to know more details about your characters than your readers ever will.
Try these exercises to help you think outside the box, learn more about your characters, and make sure you’re writing well-developed characters who feel real to your readers.
1. Take a personality quiz as your character
Personality quizzes always take me back to reading magazines as a teenager, so I love filling them out. These days, some people use their personality type to help them figure out everything from career moves to dating compatibility.
How seriously would your character take a personality quiz? No matter the answer, taking a personality quiz as your character can be a fun exercise that helps you define some key aspects of their disposition.
Try one or all of these tests for insights into your character:
2. Put your character in a scary (or sticky) situation
You can learn a lot about a person from how they react when they’re afraid or stuck.
So make your character sweat—put them on an airplane full of turbulence, get them stuck in an elevator, or have them face a fear or phobia that’s specific to them. How would they react? With visible panic? Eerie calm?
Write a short scene, even if you don’t use it in your novel, to learn how your character behaves under pressure.
3. Give your character in a moral dilemma
Drop your character into a tough ethical situation—something that forces them to choose between two values.
Would they lie to protect a friend? Steal to survive? Write about how they choose their next move to help uncover their core beliefs and decision-making process.
4. Play “Two Truths and a Lie” with your character
This is one of those icebreaker games that can help people get to know each other. You share two facts that are true about yourself, and one lie. Other people have to guess which one is the lie.
Come up with what your character would share for this game. What kind of lie would they tell about themselves? Which truths would they feel comfortable sharing? Would they compulsively lie for all three “facts”?
What they choose to share or not share about themselves can say a lot about how they wish to be perceived by others.
5. Figure out your character’s astrology sign based on their personality
Whether or not you truly believe that Zodiac signs influence personality traits, it can be a fun exercise to see where your characters would fall on an astrology chart. Besides, astrology might be meaningful to your character or other people in their life, so their sign might even be relevant at some point in the story.
Check out which personality traits are said to correlate with which signs to see which one fits your character the best.
As a bonus, this can also help you come up with a birth date for your character if you need ideas for that.
6. Fill out a character profile sheet
As you complete character development exercises and learn more about your character, you may have a hard time keeping track of all the details.
Building a character profile is a great way to log all your character’s traits so you don’t lose track. Here’s a 100-trait template to get you started.
7. Take your character out to dinner
What would your character talk about on the drive to the restaurant? What would they order? How would they treat the wait staff?
Dropping your character into an everyday situation like going out to dinner can help you figure out some of their likes and dislikes, funny little quirks, and other traits another person might notice if they were dining with them.
8. Have your character participate (or not) in a current social media trend
Would your character participate in the ice bucket challenge, or never be caught dead doing such a thing? Where would they stand on the man vs. bear debate? Would they prank a partner to follow an internet trend?
There’s always some kind of social media trend going around. Try writing your character’s take on the current one. Whether or not it’s relevant for your story, writing about joining an internet trend (or refusing to) can give you insights on your character’s relationship with social media, how they feel about following the crowd, and more.
9. Interview your character with a questionnaire
You can easily find a character questionnaire to help you explore who your character is from their point of view.
Marcel Proust’s Proust Questionnaire is popular with writers (and fans of Vanity Fair), and I like this one with 200+ questions from Dave Chesson at Kindlepreneur.
When you interview your character, you don’t have to ask them every single question from the questionnaire. The point is to get a feel for your character’s voice, get the answers that are important to you, and find out how your character would respond to someone getting nosy with them.
10. Write your character’s dating app bio (or job resume)
What would your character say about themselves in a Tinder bio or a professional resume? How honest (or exaggerated) would they be?
Writing out how your character would describe themselves is a great exercise to explore your character’s voice, confidence level, and self-image.
Time to develop your characters
Character development doesn’t have to be a chore—it can actually be one of the most creative parts of the writing process. Whether you’re outlining a new protagonist or deepening a side character, these exercises are here to spark inspiration and reveal who your characters really are beneath the surface.
The more time you spend getting to know them, the more they’ll come alive on the page. Believe me, your readers will feel the difference!