Making a Character is Like Building a House: How to Craft Solid Characters Readers Will Love

In a lot of ways creating a character is like building a house. A writer works from the bottom up; first starting with a foundation, and then an idea for the character’s character arc or role in the story, then their relationships to other characters, internal motivations and attitudes, and lastly their effect on both other characters and the world of the story at large. These aspects can be represented by a foundation, walls, inner décor, and a garden. This article will explain how considering each of these aspects as physical things that readers will encounter can help writers create characters that feel three dimensional and real.

The Foundation: Character Archetypes

Every character starts with an idea. Maybe an author wants to write about a chosen one main character and their envious sibling. Perhaps they have this idea about a princess in a tower who’s tower suddenly collapses. How will she cope with it? What kind of personality does she need to have to not herself collapse in despair? Sometimes an initial idea is not related to the character themselves to start with at all. If an author wants to write a story about a month-long race with on the road combat and plenty of gorgeous vistas, then they will want a main character who will suit that kind of story. No matter what the initial idea is, however, many of the first ideas that come to mind will have to do with familiar archetypes. Character archetypes are tropes related to characters which are familiar to both authors and readers due to common use in media.

Archetypes can be used as shorthand; they can express a lot of things about a character without having to get into everything about their backstory. If a character is stoic and distant and either the narration or another character makes it clear that that character is a blacksmith, then the reader learns that despite the character’s unfriendly attitude they will most likely still be a friend and ally to the protagonists. Blacksmiths are usually characterized as gruff individuals who are caring despite a seemingly unfriendly demeanor. All these ideas about the character and common characteristics associated with them work as foundations. Nothing is new under the sun, so in most circumstances characters will be able to be boiled down to some kind of archetype but that does not mean it is impossible to create original characters. The originality of the character will be built up on top of these foundations. After all, foundations on their own are never going to be exciting or innovative. They simply provide a surface on which to build.

The Walls: Character Arcs and Roles

In some ways the walls of a house are the most important. They will be some of the first parts of a house that people coming to visit, or even just walking by will see. Based on how the walls are laid out and any glimpses they can get through the windows, they will create an assumption of how the house is laid out in their heads. In this way they will form an idea about what the character is like and what their role in the story will be. Walls represent everything that is immediately apparent about a character from their introduction as well as their self-contained actions in the story. Much like a house’s foundation, readers will not be able to see the initial ideas that characters are built on top of, they will only be able to see the structures that rise from those foundations. While internal motivations are incredibly important to character creation, everything internal is made in service to having the character fill some role in the story which will dictate the shape that the character takes.

Something that is important to remember however, is the fact that readers will not be able to see the whole shape of the walls from the start. When they approach the house, they will only be able to see the front. They might be able to form some guess about the shape of the back walls before they see them, but this does not mean that their guess will be accurate. It is only through experiencing the story, moving through the house and into the backyard, that they will be able to fully see and understand the character and their role completely. In order to construct the walls a writer must consider what a reader will first see about the character and what assumptions they will make about the role and character arc the character will have. Do they want to let the back of the house look the way the reader expects, or will they make it more surprising? Is the shape of the house even that important to the story? It could be that the character’s arc is more predictable but that the effects of those events in the world are more important.

Inside Décor: Motivations and Relationships

Thus far all the character aspects that have been discussed have been external. If the readers are guest coming to visit a house, then they have only just walked up and not yet entered. Because of this all the qualities of the character that have been established have to do with how they can be seen. These facts have to do with things that become apparent to readers without truly getting familiar with the character’s inner world. The next step is to consider what the reader finds when they open the door and step inside. The first things that becomes evident as the reader starts to spend more time with any character are their motivations and attitudes about the world. These beliefs usually affect their actions so in this case it works to think of them as wallpaper. It also makes sense because wallpaper is not visible from the outside and it also defines their actions. The other thing about the wallpaper is that once a reader comes in and sees the wallpaper in the first few rooms and they will assume that all the rooms will have the same wallpaper. That is to say that all their actions will be justified by the same motivations, but a house has more than just the main room. There are always inner rooms and those could be covered in different motivations and attitudes. Deeper rooms are reached as the reader becomes more familiar with the character, or when something from within those rooms becomes too loud to stop stay contained.

A house of course is also full of furniture. In this case furniture represents keepsakes or scars from the character’s past. They can also represent a character’s relationship with other characters. There is nothing as specific as saying a character’s experience learning from another character is represented by a chair but there will be some relationships or events that will be more present in whatever room they are in while others will just be small footnotes. The difference between large furniture and knickknacks. What events or relationships will be more obvious to the readers? Which will take some thorough looking around to notice? Thinking about these kinds of things can be a good way to figure out how characters can open up to other characters or to the story itself.

The Garden: Lasting Effects and Legacies

This is where the reader’s journey will end. They walked up to the house taking stock of the shape of the walls, were let in through the door to see the rooms taking note of the inner décor, and now they have come out into the backyard. Now they can see the end of the character’s arc, represented by the shape of the back walls, but that is not the end, is it? In most cases, characters are not totally insular, just like the house has décor inside which coincides with their own relationships with others, other characters will also have décor that corresponds with the current house. The garden represents direct effects of the character, both on other characters and on the world as a whole. While considering what the reader will see here one might also ask, how much of this is the character themselves aware of? Some of it might be contained in the garden bed, neat flowerbeds, the direct results of the character’s efforts. Other things might be sprouting in hidden corners, weeds having crept in while the character was unaware. Some effects might not even be contained in their own backyard. It could be that the decision to plant a tree that has subsequently gotten very tall has inspired neighbors to do the same. This might represent some kind of tradition or organization that the character has started. It could also be something less positive however, instead of a helpful organization, maybe the tree would represent some kind of structure where irritating birds roost and end up leaving droppings wherever the tree’s branches reach over the neighbor’s fences.

No matter what the garden will always be a good place to sit and think about everything that a character has done in the story and what might be next for them. After the end of a story readers will be left thinking about what the character could do next and what the current effects of their presence in the world will mean in the future.

Conclusion

Despite varying story structures and differences in character introductions considering all these aspects and how readers will view them can be a useful way to construct a character. This is because a character with any kind of presence in the narrative will always be driven by their own inner motivations and leave an effect on other characters and the world. While a writer does not need to tackle each of these aspects in this kind of order to create interesting characters, it can be useful to build on what is already known about the character and consider how all these aspects of them will be seen by outsiders. Readers after all, will never have the full story of everything a writer thought of but by directing the reader’s attention to what authors want to show, authors can make sure that they see everything that should be seen.