When I first started writing stories, I read numerous online articles and guides about developing characters. You’ve probably seen them yourself. Even many established authors have posted similar character profile worksheets. Most of them focus on surface characteristics, quirks, or hooks, like her hair- and eye-color, her smoking habit, the way she eats her hair while she’s talking on the phone, or the lisp with which she pronounces her R’s. But these are all just, at best, surface manifestations of what really makes a character feel like a real person— or fails to make her real.

These quirks are just what we see on the surface. But character is what happens under the surface. The Oxford Pocket Dictionary of Current English defines character as “the mental and moral qualities distinctive to an individual” (emphasis added). Character is not the physical manifestations we observe on the surface, but the psychological ones we don’t necessarily observe. Or as Holly Lisle put it, character is “who you are when no one is looking, and who you are when someone is looking, and how those two people are different, and why.” Character is what you discover when you dig deep down into a person’s personality.

Ideas are a dime a dozen, which is no consolation when you just can’t seem to come up with that perfect idea that will pull you past your writer’s block and bring the story you’re trying to write into focus. And the more you wrack your brain, the harder it is to come up with ideas.

Instead of giving up, sometimes it helps if you take a step back and look at the problem from a different angle. Here are 9 creativity exercises that may help generate ideas for fictional characters.

They say ideas are a dime a dozen, even character ideas. Many experienced authors don’t even think about it anymore; they don’t remember when they were just starting out, facing a blank page, without any idea how to make their characters full and interesting. Because when it comes right down to it, if you want ideas for your fictional characters should be like, you can just look at the people around you. I tend to write down character ideas, as they occur to me, in an idea journal, which I can then go back to for inspiration when I’m when I’m writing a story. All authors at some level base their fictional characters on what they observe of real-life people.

But it takes more than just throwing character ideas at the page, if you want to end up with an actual story. Character ideas may give you zany and quirky, but if you want your characters to have depth, you have to make them feel like real, full-fledged people. In other words, you need characters that have a story to tell.

This year, during the holiday break between December 25 and January 1, the kids and I and Grandma and Grampa piled into a rented minivan and trekked 7 hours to southern New Jersey… where the aunts and uncles and first and second cousins reside. And while I was there, I finally understood why Brothers and Sisters makes me laugh.

But the biggest epiphany I had…

-TimK

Holly Lisle hit the nail on the head on her website in her advice about how to write a fictional character:

“What?!” I can almost hear you saying. “You want me to throw away my ideas?”