People Watching- How To Make Your Characters More Realistic

Let me share a deep physiological observance straight from the mind of Amanda Vinshire. There are a lot of problems that arise for people of our age group trying to write books. These cover a wide range depending on who you are and where you’re from. But…

The real problem is a lack of experience.

I don’t care if you’re the smartest kid in your class or in your state or providence or territory or country, if you’re under the age of 20, you’re not going to have as much experience as someone who is over 20, unless said person over 20 lived under a rock their whole life. Don’t try to argue the point with me. You may have more experience in some areas. By the time I’m 20, I will have been lucky to have been outside my country once. I know people younger than me who have already traveled halfway around the globe. They have more travel experience than me. But I have more experience in things like high school than this middle school traveler. Age brings experience and that’s something that’s very hard to fake.

You have probably never been to college. You have probably never really been in love. I’m not talking about a crush or a seven month relationship, I mean you honestly want to spend the rest of your life with this person. You’ve probably never been married and you probably have never had kids. You’ve probably only ever made friends with the people put in your path, like kids from school or church or your soccer team, unless you’ve made some besties online.

As I said before, experience is one of the hardest things to fake. That why when you read books by young authors, they’re usually about teenagers and a good portion of the time they take place in a world that doesn’t exist. You don’t have to have a ton of experience to come up with a fake world, simple as that. Just a clever mind and plenty of imagination. Teenagers are easy to write because they’re familiar. We are teenagers. We know how we think.

I guess this brings me to my actual point of this post. Because of this lack of experience, as good as we might be at taking our angsty teenager thoughts and sticking them on paper, we are at a disadvantage.

A disadvantage I tell you.

Particularly as we, as a authors in general, tend to be solitary, introverted people.

What is a character?

A character is a person that an author created and stuck in a fictional situation. Said character will have to travel through the plot to create entertainment for the reader.

Above all, when we write a character, we’re trying to write a person.

I want to really try to impress that upon you. A well written character should be a person. I won’t say a human being, because it might be a vampire or an elf or something else, but it is a person. Someone who is talking and breathing (except in the case of the vampire) and should be real enough that someone wouldn't be surprised to see them in real life (once again, with the exception of the elves or werewolves or whatnot).

And the only way to really create a Person (from now on referred to with a proper noun in replacement of the word character) is to be familiar with people. Straight up. There. I said it.

You have to know people to write about them. The way real people think and act and talk.

It may seem pretty obvious, but sometimes when you’re trying to write a character, it doesn’t seem very obvious. I’m going to quote Margaret in her post about How to Make a Non-Cliché Protagonist

“Anyway, because everyone is different, then that means for the most part, everyone has a slightly different combination of traits.

In other words - for the most part, People aren't Cliche.  So it's a safe bet to model a character off a person or two. Choose the traits that give you pause and make you say "really?"

Challenge: Choose a trait or two that drives you up the wall. Chances are, it'll make a pretty good character trait.”

Basically I’m telling you to “People Watch”.

It sounds creepy, I know, but it doesn’t have to be! All the time. Sometimes it will be creepy, yes. But when you’re a best-selling author and you tell the person you were creeping out that Richard was based off of them and that everyone was heartbroken when Richard died by being stabbed repeatedly in the chest (you don’t like the person you were creeping out and writing this scene was very fun for you), everything thing will be fine!

In all honesty though, “People Watching” does not have to be creepy at all. It could be as simple as going to watch a movie at a friend’s house instead of spending three hours at home on the computer. And while you’re watching the movie, especially if your friend invited other people that you might not associate very much, it’s a good idea to watch (not creepily) them. See what kinds of things they do, listen to the way they talk. I find it fascinating whenever I hang out with my girly friends to just sit around and listen to the things they talk about and the way they think about things. My best friend has four swords, a crossbow, likes shooting guns and torturing fictional characters in her free time. That’s not exactly “normal”. And while I think it’s awesome and just sit back and laugh while she coos over crossbow parts, it’s not normal. If she was the only person I associated with normally, what type of characters would I write all the time?

Exactly.

Now, I will admit that some of this people watching can be done from reading other books, usually books written by older authors who do have more experience in the world and with other people than you. Since we are just teenagers and most of the friends we’re going to make are at the whims of our parents and where we live, trying to learn from these other people and authors is a good idea. It’s also a great benefit for your writing skills and can help you with your plot and world building as well.

But remember what I said about it’s hard to fake experience?

Yeeaaaahhhhh. There’s no real substitute for having to sit there for an hour in a classroom listening to someone make themselves sound like an idiot and really wondering what on earth are they doing in an honors class for crying out loud? Or try to give comfort to someone who HONESTLY thinks the world is over because she’s 16 and a half and have only been on one date. Or, here’s one of my favorites, hear a girl complain about her boyfriend spending too much time with his best friend and then three days later hear the best friend complain about the boyfriend spending too much time with her.

People.

There aren’t dozens of types of people. There aren’t hundreds. There aren’t thousands. There are MILLIONS of types of people. We’re all people with individual traits and individual mixes of these traits and there is NO WAY for you to be able to capture that without actually going out and looking at, listening to, and being with these real people.

Watch them. It can be pretty funny. And it really is a big help for your ability to create characters. The more familiar you are with actual flesh and blood people, the easier it is for you to make it seem like your jumble of words is a flesh and blood Person.

Warning/Disclaimer: This all being said, don’t base a character directly off someone else. Steal some of their traits, sure! But don’t write them into your book. That’s tacky and a bad idea, as much as it will get you a pretty authentic character. It could also get you into trouble with the person later.

(P.S. Got two fours on my AP tests!!!! WHOOOO!)