Characters in Your Stories and Personal Essays Can Help Keep Readers Engaged

What short story writing lessons are there about creating engaging characters? LESSON 4

Characters and character development are important to all your stories and personal essays, if you want to help keep your readers engaged. Have you been following the writing tips and advice I’ve been posting from the short story writing course I’m taking?

If you have, you’re probably ready for this lesson (number 4) because I’m a little behind in posting, since the last three lessons.

Feel free to bring yourself up to speed on this valuable short story writing information, before proceeding with the information you find here in this Lesson (4). For your convenience, I’ve provided the following links to take you to those important lessons.

Whether you consider the other three lessons or not, this lesson about creating engaging characters will definitely be of benefit to you. As a writer, the topic of how to keep your readers engaged is one you should always be concerned with.

This is true for whatever type of writing that you’re doing; if there are people in your story (fictional or otherwise), you need to write about them in a certain way. This lesson talks a little bit about how to do that, and why.

Characters You Write About

The characters you write about, and how well you develop their characteristics can and will, have an influence on how well your story is told.

This will mean the difference in how long the readers connect with the story and stay engaged with the writing.

Fiction Characters

If you happen to be writing fictional characters, it’s important to allow readers an opportunity to get to know the character, along with any intimate details about them, but only the details that will be relevant to the plot of the story.

For instance, you might notice the photo in the beginning of this story. It’s a picture of Bob Marley; a man with dreads. On more than one occasion, I’ve mentioned how much I like a man with dreads on his head, so it’s not unusual for me to include a male character with dreadlocks.

When I do my job correctly as a writer, readers should get a picture of the exact type of man I’m writing about, and they even have a point of reference from my previously posted images.

Take the time to create three-dimensional characters who have quirks, mannerisms, and personality traits that are believable (with regard to the setting and circumstances).

When writing about that character that you have fleshed out, you should be able to determine if an action or reaction would be believable, based on the picture you’ve already painted of them.

Real Life Characters

Some short fiction writers like myself, may decide to write about real life characters that we insert into fictional settings. I also use real life characters in real life situations, and merely change the names. Whatever the case is for you as a writer, the same still holds true about the characters your write about.

Write engaging and descriptive dialogue and narratives, so your readers can be properly introduced to the characters.

A good example is how I wrote about my favorite brother Craig; someone with a big personality in real life. I believe I successfully helped readers get acquainted with him through the descriptive way I wrote about him. This will come in handy when I decide to write about him again, which I will.

Four Necessary Elements

Here are four main things that your reader should always know about your characters, so you should consider them as necessary elements to your story:

• Appearance — how they look
• Action — the way they move
• Speech — how they speak
• Thought — the way they think

As you might imagine, when you focus and elaborate on those four items for each character, you’ll be able to paint a vivid picture of a real live person in the minds of your readers.

This particular information is something I already had to become familiar with, when writing my previous novels (and using a primary pen name).

That is why I was mindful of this in my short story “Harder to Forget.” Speech is really the tricky one when you’re writing dialogue for your characters, and you definitely need to be consistent throughout the story.

For example, in Harder to Forget, the husband uses grammatically incorrect words and expressions, such as gonna’ for going to, etc.

He also uses more curse words than his wife, who generally speaks pretty good English, and tries to refrain from all the profanity.

I had to painstakingly edit the story before publishing it, to make sure I didn’t inadvertently have the wife speaking like him, and vice versa.

Knowing your characters in this truly intimate way, will enable you to be consistent in how you write about them. You will be able to provide depth to their personalities and cause them to appear more real life-like.

The personality traits you assign to your characters will end up bleeding into the story, but only in a way that helps advance the plot.

In short story writing, we learn the importance of recognizing our characters are more than simply a vehicle we use to get our story told. If you create them correctly, they will have layers, like people do in real life, and the readers will find them more believable.

In the same way that you need ample details to flesh out your characters’ personality, you also want to refrain from giving too much information.

You might be tempted to add some quirky little trait that you think readers will be entertained by. But unless that quirky trait will end up appearing later, as a relevant part of the story, it’s best to leave it out.

POINTS TO REMEMBER:

1) To help keep readers engaged, your stories and essays need to have three dimensional characters.

2) Short stories do not afford you the necessary time you need, to fully develop a lot of characters.

3) If you’re writing short stories instead of longer fiction, don’t be tempted to include multiple characters that will require complex, three dimensional personalities.

That’s it for this lesson. Don’t forget to Follow Me and return to see what Lesson 5 will cover.

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