In order to craft a fully three-dimensional main character that your readers will want to follow to the end, you need to have these basics in the bag…

A story needs its central character. Or characters, if your story world and narrative are broad enough to encompass more than one point-of-view. With these characters, you ought to be pouring your heart and soul into making them as real as possible. After all, they are who your readers are going to follow throughout your story. Often, your main character (s) will evolve during the writing and development processes. But there are (at least) five things that you ought to have designated before you put fingers to keyboard on their journey. Those things are as follows:

THEIR ROLE IN THE STORY

This might seem an odd and/or self-explanatory place to start. They’re the main character — that’s their role. No — think deeper. Are they a hero or an anti-hero, for example? Are they a romantic lead or a lovable loser? A tragicomic figure or a straight man? Having this down from the beginning will help you formulate their specific characteristics later. Such as their personality, behaviour, and relationships with other characters.

WHAT THEY WANT

I studied theatre in school, and in acting classes, it was often drilled into us the question, “What does your character want?” Stanislavski had a point and it transfers into creating characters in literature too. Your main character needs to have a clear desire or motivation. If I take my current work-in-progress, You Can Hear Chopin from the Attic as an example, the main character Heinrich Oeunhausen wants two things. Most importantly, he wants to protect his wife from the Nazis; his secondary want is to run his business with as little interference as possible.

In knowing what your main characters want, you can generate conflict, a crucial element to any story (and we’ll come to it a bit later in this article). It also leads you to decide how they deal with said wants. How do they go about achieving them? And how do they respond to the challenges along the way? Do they get what they want very easily? If so, how, if at all, do they lose it? It spawns an entire list of questions that, as you answer, you build a fuller, broader picture of both the story and the characters.

WHAT THEIR ARC IS

I have had occasion to refer to the very core basic of storytelling as: your character has a Point A and a Point B. Writing the story is very much a matter of filling in the gap in the middle. How do they get from A to B? It’s a very simplistic way of describing the character arc (or story arc).

In other words, from the beginning you have to know where the character starts and where you want them to end up. Like a lot of things in writing, this will change the further along you go. It isn’t always necessarily a physical destination, either; it can just as easily be a mental or emotional development. In some cases, you may find it fitting that their journey is not so much an arc, but that they come full circle. As long as it is a satisfying payoff, of course.

THEIR CONFLICT

As mentioned before, there is no real story without some form of conflict. I was taught before that The cat sat on the mat is not a story. But The cat sat on the dog’s mat is. Once you’ve fleshed out your main character out a bit, you can designate the conflict in their journey. Who or what is the conflict with? What causes or has caused it? How does it prevent the character from getting what they want?

Again, to refer back to You Can Hear Chopin, Heinrich faces conflict in both his primary and secondary wants. His wife, who is mentally ill, is at constant threat by the Nazis, who just so happen to be frequent guests in Heinrich’s hotel. Indeed, a couple of them are even close friends. With that in mind, his desire to run his business as smoothly as possible is also incommoded by the Nazis’ presence there.

WHAT MAKES THEM… THEM

Okay so maybe this isn’t a majorly important point. However, I think it’s always good to have a recurring motif or behaviour, or a centric personality trait, to help you along in fleshing your main character out. That motif may end up not being massively important in the story, but it helps you towards working out the character’s greater personality. Or it’s a part of their character that your readers can pick up on. I have written Heinrich Oeunhausen as being very conscious of time all the time (in his line of work as a hotel manager, everything has to be on schedule) so I often have him checking his watch. Meanwhile, in the Berylford novels, when designing Abel Stirkwhistle, the first thing I knew about him was that he was bad-tempered and fearsome. So, even before I turned him into the sunken, twisted old man he became, I had him walking around grumbling, grunting, snarling, and so on.

Got any other ideas? Let me know in the comments section. For more author news and views, my Facebook and Instagram pages are here. And drop a subscription to my YouTube channel to remain informed of the latest, plus some exclusives. Furthermore, my fortnightly podcast, The Dale Hurst Writing Show, is available to listen to here on Spotify.

Are you someone that has always thought, “I’d love to write a novel,” but had no idea where to start? When starting your first novel becomes less of a pipe dream and a more genuine ambition, refer to this list first…

Starting your first novel is a massive feat. That’s starting it; say nothing of finishing it! Over the course of my short life thus far, I’ve encountered a number of people who have told me they would love to write a book, but no idea where to start. And then there’s a select few that have begun, got to a certain point and given up. Or indeed, an even smaller number who have produced first drafts and then done nothing with them.

This post is addressed to those who need a bit of guidance before starting to get serious. Becoming a writer is not just an ambition; it’s something of a lifestyle choice too. So here are five things you will need, without question, before starting your first novel.

1. TIME

You think this would go without saying, really, but it beggars belief how many people expect that it takes no time at all to write a compelling story. Sure, you can chuck a load of words together in an hour and see what you come out with, but I’d consider you a prodigy if it was a fully cohesive, entertaining story with interesting plotlines and irresistible characters. Building all of those things takes time. The Berylford books took me eight and twelve years to finish, in total; that’s numerous drafts, re-drafts, editing sessions, planning sessions and more. With hours of social life sacrificed in the process.

My advice is, if you have a busy lifestyle, to reserve a regular period of your week — maybe an evening one weekday or something — in which you do nothing except work on the book. That way, it becomes a part of that lifestyle, as opposed to an intrusion on it.

2. A GOOD, ORIGINAL IDEA

I often despair at the number of aspiring and amateur authors who say they’re writing a fantasy novel. Simply because it’s such a saturated genre, it stuns me to think how they have come up with something new, that isn’t not-so-secretly “inspired” by Tolkien or George R. R. Martin.

To have a story worth publishing (assuming that’s what you want to do with it), it has to be of a decent quality, namely of considerable interest to an audience. And it should also be original, i.e. not done before or tweaked from something similar. Having inspirations and influences is fine, but the story should be your own. So, starting your first novel not only requires you to recognise what is considered a high-quality idea. You also need to have knowledge of the genre your story belongs in.

3. COMMITMENT

An offshoot from the first point in a way. Commitment is so important for any creative project, not just for writing. I have worked with enough non-committal people to know the annoyance when they start something, often very good, and don’t or won’t see it through to the end. I still harbour some bitterness about one or two projects that ran dry on account of the other half’s lack of commitment.

When you’re writing your first book, try to maintain the attitude that you are working on something big. An awesome achievement with potential rewards at the end of it. Because otherwise, I will say there’s probably no point in pursuing it in the first place, if you’re going to get so far and then just leave it.

4. RESEARCH SKILLS

Whether it’s a gripping thriller or a work of epic fantasy, you won’t get very far without research. To me, it becomes very clear very quickly when a writer has no idea what they’re writing about. And that indicates a lack of research. So having those research skills down — knowing what you need to find out and where to start looking — is of extreme importance. If you’ve read this point and thought, “I can’t be bothered with that,” or “Who has the time?” then maybe writing a book isn’t the right thing for you.

Research not only helps you construct your story and your characters, it also adds to your knowledge of literary style and form.

5. A UNIQUE VOICE

No one likes a copycat or a wannabe. As I said in an earlier point, it never hurts to have influences and inspirations, as in any line of business or creative ambition. But to make your work really worth reading, it has to come from you personally. And that means developing for yourself a unique writing voice. A lot of my readers have said to me that, when reading the Berylford books, they heard my voice as they read the words. That’s not only a massive compliment; that means that my writing voice, my vocabulary and style, successfully came out. And that’s what you want to aim to achieve when writing your first novel.

For more author news and views, my Facebook and Instagram pages are here. And drop a subscription to my YouTube channel to remain informed of the latest, plus some exclusives. Furthermore, my fortnightly podcast, The Dale Hurst Writing Show, is available to listen to here on Spotify.