Are your characters people or stereotypes?
Harry Potter, Tom Sawyer, Princess Leia, Romeo and Juliet.
If you are an aspiring writer or an avid reader, you know the abovementioned names aren’t of any ordinary people. They are the protagonists, the main characters of some of the greatest novels of all time.
See, how swiftly you recognized them! As if they were your best companions for a long time. And trust me, they were.
Characters are key to a memorable story
When we read a story or a novel, oftentimes, it’s the characters that we remember the most; not the plot or the conflict. After all, it’s the characters that make a story humane; taking us on a dreamlike journey with their merits, contradictions, flaws, etc.
As a result, if you are writing a novel, the success of it is not going to depend on which novel writing software you are using. But it is certainly going to depend largely on the believability of your characters.
The more humane and real they are with both the perfections and the flaws; the more chance they have got to be genuine and to rise above the generic stereotypes.
Give your characters a unique life of their own
To avoid falling into the trap of stereotypes, the most practical way for writers is to begin with giving characters a life of their own.
Where they were born? How old are they? How do they look like? What relationship do they have with their father? And with the mother? Asking all these questions would gradually give your characters a basic structure.
However, it may also make your characters feel very generic. I mean, you don’t remember Harry Potter just because of how he looked like or where he was born, do you?
Help your characters surprise you
As a general rule, people, even the wicked, are much more naive and simple-hearted than we supposed. And we ourselves are, too.
Fyodor Dostoevsky
People are not as simple and straightforward as non-living things. We are a delicate mix of good and bad, novelty and flaws, selfishness and selflessness, sensitivity and insensitivity, and so on at the same time.
So, your characters shouldn’t be all perfect and rigid. Rather, they should be as surprising and multi-dimensional as the real people.
Utilize a novel planning software like bibisco
bibisco – an innovative novel planning software – offers an exciting feature to dive deep into the complexity of human nature, helping you to create your characters as people and not as stereotypes.
With a set of difficult questions, bibisco guides you to find out information about your characters that don’t easily meet the eyes.
For example, it’s easy to answer whether your character is brave or not. But it’s certainly not easy to answer how is the relationship with their father? Or how do they react to successes and failures? By asking a series of such questions, bibisco would force you to think elaborately about your characters and go beyond the realm of your novel.
Eventually, these thoughts and imaginations would shape the ways your characters would be behaving in the particular instances of your story, making them real and not just a stereotype.
Conclusion
While there is no story without conflicts, there is no conflict that the readers would actually care about without real and believable characters. So, make sure your characters represent actual people with all the complexity before giving them challenges to solve.
A novel writing software like bibisco can surely benefit in creating multi-dimensional, humane characters; thanks to its brilliant character development features consisting of a set of difficult questions.
Are you ready to create your characters as people and not as stereotypes? Try out the feature now and let us know how exciting your experience was in the comments!
