Fleshing Out Characters

Characters are not born fully fleshed out and with a long and complicated back story. They start out as ideas, as a bundle of traits and skills at best. Sometimes, a lot of their development is done subconsciously, but it’s always a development.

Characters, especially if they’re main characters, need to be fleshed out. They need to have a character, to put it bluntly. If you’re not doing that, you will end up with stereotypes which are only defined by one trait and have no real character to speak of. So let’s have a look at how to flesh them out.

Some characters have a long and complicated back story from the very beginning, because the story is an integral part of whatever tale you wish to tell about them. In most cases, though, the back story is only for you, so you can gauge how the characters will act in a certain situation.

Take, for instance, Jane Doe. There’s quite a bit of her back story in the first novel, “Criminal Ventures”, because that one is about her growing into the role of Steven’s right hand as much as it is about the end of the organisation he built. Jane doesn’t know about her parentage (in either identity, Jane Browne doesn’t know about it, either). Her mother left her in the emergency room of a hospital with a note that her name was Jane and the doctor who checked her added the last name ‘Doe’ as a joke of sorts. In the Black Knight Agency series, Jane never loses that last name, whereas she’s set up as Jane Browne in the Knight Agency series when she becomes an active agent. In the Black Knight Agency series, her life as a foster child was anything but nice mostly because the social worker on her case (another one than in the Knight Agency series) had plans for her. Plans which came to a grinding halt when Jane hit an abusive foster father in the groin at age ten and ran away, meeting Steven about a week later, already starving and thus taking a big risk. From there on, her way to adulthood and up to age 25 is in the novel. Jane was always an aggressive child because of the berserk - because she was born with that trait and couldn’t control it as a child. In the two series, she trains to use it differently; Jane Doe has embedded it into her life, whereas Jane Browne has learned to lock it away until needed. It was her aggressive instinct to fight back which allowed her to survive her first meeting with Steven, as it were. Jane’s back story, as both the former criminal and the agent, is in the novels, so there’s not much else to say about her.

I haven’t really touched on Gabrielle Munson’s back story, on the other hand. Gabrielle has had three novellas already, but I have only dipped into how she got her powers and what they meant for her life before “Stray”, the first story about her. Gabrielle wasn’t born alone, she had a twin sister. She was the more ‘silent’ twin; Angelica, her sister, was the more active one. When both drowned at the age of three, they died, but Gabrielle came back - now alone in the world. Four years later, her powers as a necromancer broke free for the first time. That is in the stories already, unveiled bit by bit. There’s more to her back story, of course. Gabrielle was kicked out of her family and learned to live on her own. She had a very deep relationship with her grandmother (who’d come from India). To find out more about her own powers, she has studied necromancy and she has travelled a lot. What she learned is not yet in the stories.

Back story helps in a lot of ways with fleshing out the characters, because we all develop through what happens to us. It shapes our view of the world, our actions, our worries, our hopes. There’s more, however. There’s wants and needs, which also come from the back story. A character who has never had a real family might want one. A character who has never been trusted to lead their own life might need to learn that they can rely on their own decisions.

Traits are another aspect of personality. Is a character confident or shy? Do they like to be around others or are they loners? Do they have a talent for practical things or do they have a strong mind? It changes how they act in a certain situation. A confident character will face opposition head-on, because they’re sure they’ll master it. A shy character might try to evade opposition instead and will feel very nervous when having to deal with people. A person with a talent for practical work will just start repairing that warp core whereas a person with a strong mind might make several plans how to do the repairs first. It pays to make the traits logical. A charming person who is a loner is possible, but not quite as likely. A shy leader is an oxymoron in itself - a leader needs to be confident and able to make themselves heard. They may have doubts, but they won’t voice them for the good of the group.

Then there’s the skills someone has. Skills also interconnect with back story - what a character has done before, how and where they’ve lived, will have an influence on their skills. A character who has lived in the wild knows how to survive there, knows the poisonous plants, knows how to trap animals for food, how to fish. They may not be able to write and read and they may only speak the language to a certain degree, but they can certainly help the group get through a wilderness. A character who has worked as a hacker before will be able to hack into systems and help the group get access to information or even areas they’re not supposed to be in. A former police officer still knows all about procedure and can foresee how the police will react in certain cases, giving them an edge, should they decide to do a heist.

Back story, traits, and skills form a certain picture of your character and determine their actions to a degree. It’s important, though, that they don’t need to have all skills in place at the beginning of a story. There’s no reason why they shouldn’t learn how to ride or how to crack a lock during course of the story.