Give Your Characters Funny Hats

Neil Gaiman’s advice about characters

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. Relatability is key when it comes to designing or creating characters. If your readers can’t relate to anyone in your story, then they won’t have a lot to grasp onto or care about.

With relatable characters, writers can create unbelievable and otherworldly stories that still hold their readers because the characters help pull them through. But don’t just stop there. Gaiman cautions writers to give their characters funny hats.

In other words, make them memorable. Give them qualities and attributes that make them stand out. Even if it’s just one thing, make them unique.

You can make your character(s) relatable by giving them motivations, goals, or intentions that are easily defined and seen. I don’t mean by that that you shouldn’t create literary and heavy texts, but that your readers should be able to glean from your story who the character is, so they can relate to them.

Relatability also comes down to who your readers are. What is relatable to one culture or market, might not be relatable to another. So, when crafting your characters, think about who your story is for. What are they going through? What’s important to them?

But how do you give your characters funny hats?

Character Motivation, Style, and Voice

Before you skip ahead and think that you already know all about character motivation, style, and voice, I’ll warn you that I take an extremely different approach to each other than any other writer or instructor ever has.

Motivation

When motivation is normally talked about it is stated as the goal or driving force behind the character. That usually leads to a lot of the same type of stale characters who come into the story with these basic and straightforward wants, needs, and goals.

But what if we thought about motivation like personality instead? How does that deepen and broaden our use of the term so that our characters are more than their goals and story functions?

By thinking about a character’s motivation as the whole of their personality we can begin making connections outside the basic wants, needs, and goals.

Style

Like motivation, we’re going to think about a character’s style in a different way than just the way they dress or appear to the reader. Let’s think about style as choice and actions.

A character’s style is what decides whether or not they are kicking down a door or sneaking through the bathroom window. Style and choice or action should be closely aligned to create depth of character.

Voice

Following the previous trends, we aren’t going to just think about a character’s voice when it comes to how they speak. A character’s voice is how they express themselves. Yes, a character’s voice are the words they choose and in how they choose to order those words.

But it’s also about how they choose not to use words. It’s also about how they show themselves to the world. Do they hide themselves? Or are they a loud and boisterous person.

If you’re paying attention, you’ll realize that all of these things (motivation, style, and voice) all play into each other.

Putting it All Together

You can think of this motivation, style, and voice method as a triangle or pyramid or whatever you want. As long as you go into creating your own characters with more than the cardboard cut-out wants, needs, and goals. Develop those character bricks and bolts into something deeper that creates a dynamic and well-developed character.

Tips, Tricks, and Techniques

The above method that I used to dissect character can also be used to create one. I’ll go over that and more below so that you can move from a point of knowledge to a point of practicing, and eventually mastering. Like with everything, experiment with different methods to see which produces the best results for you.

Motivation, Style, and Voice

Used above, this trick of designing a character begins where most writers stop with creating character. It begins by figuring out your character’s role within the story. What do they want? What do you plan to have them accomplish within your story?

Using their basic wants, needs, and arc, begin developing character traits related to their style(dress, actions, choices) and voice (how they express themselves). While doing that, keep your story’s and character’s overall arc and storyline in mind so that you are choosing traits that add more to the story, not distract.

Character Interviews

Starting off with a general idea of who your character is or even a vague image, you can use job and relationship interviews or intimacy questions to better get to know them. Spend some time imagining a scenario where you would be able to interview your character.

How do they answer your questions? What answers do they give? Use your imagination to explore what type of person your character is. This is also useful if you have a fully developed character and want to further flesh them out.

Spend the Day With Them

My other favorite way of designing and creating a character is to spend a day within my world and finding which person or people start popping up. For example, when I know who my main character is, but I’m not sure who they really are beneath that, I spend a whole day with them inside my mind.

Spend part of your day imagining that you and your main character are together in your world. They’re right beside you, witnessing and going through your day-to-day. How do they act and respond to your world? Spend the rest of the day in their world. Have them show you their world and how they approach life where they are from. Take note of all of this. Their mannerisms and the things they say, the places they take you, etc.

Dungeons and Dragons Character Sheets

Even if you’re not writing fantasy fiction or playing D’n’D, using a worksheet from the classic tabletop role-playing game is a great way to get your creativity flowing. On a basic D’n’D character sheet, you have space to think about the character’s backstory, allies, or organizations they may belong to. This could mean schools or businesses, perhaps volunteer organizations or sports teams.

You can also get more detailed and use the list of stats to broad stroke your character’s intelligence, charisma, and more. These are pretty similar to other character-building worksheets except they are helpful for people who think better with game rules.

Contrasting Cast

This technique is better used when you already have a general idea of who your cast of characters is. Start with 2–3 characters and create other characters that are the opposite or contrast with the original character.

Many writers and instructors say that this is the best way to write a story with a lot of conflict and tension. The main reason is that all of the characters will be butting heads or in constant conflict with their opposites.

Character Sheets

Like with the D’n’D character sheets above, standard character sheets for fiction help writers create characters fast and hassle-free. There are so many to choose from out there that it kinda becomes overwhelming, so I don’t usually use this method.

If you want to use this method, I advise finding one character template sheet that you like. Use that one to create all the characters in your story. This will keep things clear and consistent with your characters. This method is becoming more frowned upon due to its cookie-cutter style.

Use Your Real Life

I caution writers about using this method because some have actually stolen people from their life and simply transplanted them onto the page of their story. This is not the best way to do this, but the quickest way to become too close to your work.

Whenever I pull a person from my real life to use as a character, I use the real person as a jumping-off point. I take their top qualities and their worse qualities and use that to create a character that is different, yet the same as their real-life inspiration. Or I’ll use a real person’s physical appearance to help design what my characters will look like.

Begin With an Archetype

Above I mentioned that there are character archetypes found in many cultures that can be used in your own fiction. To go about doing this, research into the culture you want to use an archetype or figure from and learn about that person and their ties to the culture.

Like with borrowing from your real life, don’t do a complete copy and paste — unless that is your intention — but use the archetype as a jumping-off point. Like a trickster that also happens to be a virgin maiden love interest with similarities to your enemy from work.

Write Better

When I talk to other editors and listen to agents, I’ve noticed that character(s) are the main thing that holds stories back from being accepted. This is usually related to voice. Common complaints about writers' stories both beginners and advanced is that they don’t know their characters, and therefore aren’t displaying them properly on the page.

Don’t be that writer who constantly gets rejected and sees it as a win. Actually attempt to write better, smarter, different. Don’t think about character the way so many failed writers do, push past that and into a new realm.

Fix what is holding your fiction back, so that you can finally become the author of your dreams.

Aigner Loren Wilson is a queer Black Science Fiction and Fantasy Writer of America, Horror Writer of America, and Codex writer. Her work has appeared in and is forthcoming from WIRED, Anathema, Tordotcom, Fiyah, and more. She is a Hugo Award finalist for her editing and is the author of several speculative fiction books and games.