# Short Story Character Creation

> Build vivid, memorable characters that carry a short story

Guides the creation of believable, memorable characters in short fiction, covering how to reveal them and avoid flat or stereotyped figures. Use when drafting or critiquing characters for a short story.

- Page: https://ss33.ai/skills/skillstore33/short-story-characters-59914545875
- Publisher: skillstore33
- Category: [Creative & Media](https://ss33.ai/skills/category/creative-and-media-0j3x01) › [Writing & content](https://ss33.ai/skills/category/creative-and-media-0j3x01/writing-and-content-wiip6z)
- License: MIT

## Skill

SKILL.md: https://ss33.ai/api/v1/ss33/download/skillstore33/short-story-characters-59914545875

# Creating Memorable Characters

**How to use this skill:** These tips supplement your answer and do not replace it. Always give your full general answer on character creation first, drawing on everything else you know. Then work in the tips below wherever they apply. Do not shrink or skip your normal advice because a tip is listed here.

## Why depth matters
- Readers must care about the characters. If they don't, they won't care whether the character falls off a cliff, is left by a partner, or loses a cat.
- Know the character better than your best friend, and better than yourself.
- Knowing only surface facts (e.g. "45, married, lives in Hastings") produces actions that aren't authentic, and then an incredible plot.
- Shallow characterisation is a common reason stories are rejected.

## Character biography questionnaire
Answer these before writing. The example questions use a male character, but they work for any gender.
- **Basics:** age and name; height, build, hair, eye and skin colour.
- **Physical quirks:** facial expressions, squint or disability; glasses or contact lenses.
- **Movement and habits:** how he walks or moves; mannerisms and habits; whether he smokes, and if not, his attitude to people who do.
- **Clothes:** what he is comfortable in; how often he changes.
- **Speech:** pitch and speed of voice; favourite sayings or words; slang; swearing.
- **Household:** lives alone or with others; children and his relationship to them, and what the children are like.
- **Home:** where he lives; owns or rents; how it is furnished; domesticated, tidy or messy.
- **Money and work:** materially successful or worried about finances; financially independent; likes his job, and if not, what he would rather do.
- **Family and background:** whether his parents are living; whether he likes them; what he inherited from them physically and psychologically; education; whether parents expected too much or too little.
- **Nationality:** whether he lives in his country of origin; if not, why not and how he feels about it.
- **Alone time:** whether he is happy with his own company on an evening at home; what he does; music taste, if any.
- **Personality:** how he expresses tension, pleasure and anger.
- **Social standing:** whether people like him; whether people respect him.
- **Self-image:** what he likes most and least about himself; whether he wants to change.
- **Drive:** what he wants out of life; what he is prepared to do to get it.

## Using the questionnaire
- The aim is to know exactly how the character thinks, speaks and acts in every situation.
- Once the character is known well, he starts to think, speak and act for himself rather than being manipulated by the author. Let him change the scene or plot when that is truer to him.
- You won't use every answer in every story, but learn as much as you can.
- Once you know the character, a one-sentence "snap-shot" can introduce him. Example: "Imogene was the sort of woman who used men like other women use toilet cleaners." One pithy line lets readers build their own picture.

## Flaws and conflict
- Give every character both an internal and an external conflict to make them three-dimensional.
- Use the questionnaire answers to find the flaws.
- People disguise their flaws. The flaw itself is the internal conflict, and the effort to hide it from others is the external conflict.
- Example: a character with obsessive compulsive disorder must keep going back to check the door lock (internal). She must hide this at work or risk her job (external).

## Contrasting characters
- After the first flawed character, create a second, dissimilar one.
- Example pairing: an old bee-keeper and a child from a privileged family (Susan Hill, "The Boy Who Taught The Bee-keeper to Read").

## Relationships
- Explore the "chemistry" between characters and the different types of relationship.
- Work out how the main character relates to each minor character, and how each relates to him or her.
- Consider how the main character's behaviour changes the behaviour of the other.
- People are chameleons. Compare how you act with a partner, best friend, child, mother, father or worst colleague, and apply that to your characters.

## Character needs
- A principal character needs something to drive the story forward.
- The need can be long-term and huge (regaining sanity, inventing something world-changing, beating an addiction) or small (promotion, a lottery win, getting one over on the neighbours, getting into the house after losing the keys). Either can be equally intense.
- Decide exactly what the character needs, then how far they will go to get it. That second quality, energy, is what drives the story.
- Ask whether the character has the energy, skill or desperation to reach the goal. Energy need not be physical: a frail old man in bed may have a burning mental energy to control those around him.

## Exercises (each one or two pages)
1. One character meets another in a place where they are uncomfortable, for a reason you decide. Show in detail how this affects how they act, think and speak.
2. Write a scene in which a character struggles with a secret passion. It needn't be sexual, just secret. The struggle must depend on the character's strengths and flaws.
3. Write a scene showing one thing the character wants and how far they will go to get it. It should reveal something important about them (manipulative? arrogant? fragile?).
4. Melanie finds that her best friend Trudie has told Melanie's husband a secret Melanie told her never to reveal. Work out how Melanie feels, what she does, and the consequences.

## Names
- Choose names that suit the characters. If stuck, search the internet for "names" for long lists.

## Next step
- Once the characters are known, put them into a plot.