The Physical Description of Your Character

The character is the person you are writing about. The issue of how many characters a book should have has been discussed to death – so I might as well just throw in my two pieces in. Core characters are usually around 2 – 8. The rest Tolstoy had nearly 600 characters in War and Peace and about 24 speaking roles. As you write the book you may notice a need for more but in this session create bio for at least five.

Pick a name for the characters you have created. You can use name generators like Rink Works  or search using baby name websites easily found online. When picking names that may appear in your writing avoid picking names for different characters that sound similar or start. The name should be age appropriate. A 60 year old woman named Beyoncé would be ridiculous. The easiest way would be to search for popular names in the time period your character was fictionally born. If you’re writing fantasy avoid hard to pronounce names instead you can combine two names like Daisy and Lilliana to have Daliana.

On the issue of age, is dependant on your storyline. As stated when discuss The Genre of Your Novel genres of literature, young adult and children’s literature have present age limits. However age in adult literature is the story’s prerogative i.e. not the author’s.  If writing a mystery, your character should be old enough to access the information that will be required to solve the crime but not so old that they can’t actively engage in crime fighting. The age should be appropriate to their personalities. You cannot have someone who is jaded, seventeen unless she/he has been through a whole lot of crap in their lifetime.

Think of whether your character was born in the setting that you created or will they be strangers. This will influence the actions and reactions of the character. Give their race and ethnic background in case there are several ethnicities that will appear in your story.

My favorite part of characterization is creating a body for my character. You can choose to create your character from scratch or to base the body on the people you know or can filch over the internet. The most important elements you’ll need to consider as you create the physical description are; height, weight, body type, skin tone, hair color, texture and style. Apart from the visual try to think of other senses to describe your character for instance how does he smell, how does his voice sound? Give him/ her a few character quirks such stammering, overuse of a particular word.