How I develop strong characters

Every novel I’ve written has come together in a different order.

A few years ago, I co-wrote a book with a friend that started with a setting, based on a trip we took to a slightly haunted villa outside of Rome. My Holy Grail novel project, the one that’s been eluding me for years, started with a character. She popped into my head fully formed, like Athena emerging from Zeus’ head (anyone else not able to stop thinking about Emily Wilson’s review of The Odyssey?). I still haven’t quite figured out what story makes sense for that character.

My most recent project started with plot. I could see the inciting incident and the climax immediately, two perfect bookends. But I didn’t have any specific characters in mind. It was like I had a spotlight shining down onto those two story beats, but the stage was empty. So I set about the work of developing the character(s) who would take the stage in this project.

Fortunately, I’ve spent a lot of time thinking and teaching about effective character development in the last couple of years, thanks to my work as the Director of Community at ProWritingAid, where I study fiction development and get to speak with experts like Alison Espach and Erin Bowman. Their scholarship has had a deep impact on how I think about building characters and I will reference it below.

In this post, I’ll break down exactly how I have used what I learned to create strong characters that drive plot forward.

When I was younger, I learned that stories have internal and external conflict.

External conflict is conflict in the outside world. External conflict could be against another character, or against nature, or against some type of societal structure.

Internal conflict is within the character themselves. A character may struggle with feelings of guilt, or with impulsiveness, or with inadequacy (relatable!).

Good stories not only have both internal and external conflict… but the two types of conflict need to be in tension with each other in order for the story to be most compelling.

Let’s take the example of Kaz Brekker from Six of Crows. Kaz has plenty of external conflict. Kaz is the ambitious young leader of a criminal organization that is constantly scrapping for territory and influence against rival organizations. He has grand plans to become rich and powerful, as well as to take down those who have wronged him.

But Kaz also has a lot of internal conflict: he covers feelings of inadequacy with swaggering bravado and refuses to trust other people because of terrible things that happened in his past.

What makes Six of Crows such an engaging story is how Kaz’s internal and external conflicts interplay with each other. Kaz won’t be able to overcome his external conflicts (become rich and famous, beat his enemies) unless he also overcomes his internal conflicts.

That is tension that propels a narrative.

So, stories need external and internal conflicts that are in tension with each other to be effective. How do you decide what those conflicts should be? There are three key questions.

I personally find it easiest to start with the character’s want. The want is usually an external goal that the character is well aware of—they often speak it directly on the page. In other words, the character’s want isn’t secret from either the character or the reader.

In my conversation with Alison Espach, we looked at the story What You Left in the Ditch by Aimee Bender. On the very first page, the narrator Mary shares that she wants a kiss from her husband… something not easy to get because her husband has returned from the war without lips.

According to Espach, great stories establish the main character’s want, or external goal, as close to the beginning as possible. The story continues until the the reader finds out whether or not the main character achieves that goal.

The want creates external conflict. Kaz from Six of Crows wants to be the most powerful boss in his city… but others want that title, too. But that external conflict isn’t the only thing standing in Kaz’s way.

According to Espach, good characters also have a need. Unlike the want, the need isn’t usually expressly stated on the page. It’s up to the character, and thus the reader, to figure out what they need to achieve their goal.

Mary from What You Left in the Ditch thinks she needs a kiss, but what she actually needs is the intimacy with her husband that was lost when he went to war.

Unveiling the need, to both character and reader, provides a lot of fodder for exploration. In Six of Crows, Bardugo spends just as much time exploring why Kaz and his compatriots are the way they are as she does showing what happens to them as they chase their ambitions.

The main character usually doesn’t understand their true need until much later in the story… when they finally realize that they can’t achieve their external conflict without getting their internal conflict sorted, too.

So, how do you create internal conflict that spans the entirety of the novel? You need to give the character something they are spectacularly, fantastically wrong about.

I first learned about this idea in Erin Bowman’s fantastic course Plotting with Revelations. Your main character needs to be wrong about something, often something in their past, in order to build believable internal conflict. This flawed belief is so baked into how the character sees the world that it’s actively working against them and the plot’s entire job is to force them to confront it.

I find it easiest to think about this concept in terms of lessons from your character’s past. Your character had formative experiences in their past and, unfortunately for them, took all the wrong lessons away from those experiences.

Think the romance lead who was betrayed in her past relationship and takes away the lesson that she should never give away her heart again.

In the case of Six of Crows, Kaz’s past betrayals have taught him that trusting someone else will get him killed—he does everything he can possibly do to avoid having to trust another person.

Of course, for Kaz to actually achieve his goal, he needs to realize what he’s wrong about… which doesn’t come easily.

So, how do I use these principles in drafting?

First, I spend a lot of time considering the answers to the three questions above. As I mentioned in my article on novel planning, I make myself fill out this template as part of my preparation process:

My main character is ______. The character’s stated/outward goal is to __________. They think that they want this because __________.

But what the character actually needs is ________. This needs comes from __________ (history/backstory about the character).

That need/history/backstory has created this flaw: __________. This flaw shows up when __________ (a behavior or pattern), and it’s rooted in __________ (backstory or belief that created it).

After that, I start to think about how the character’s flaw (wrong belief) will interplay with the external conflict throughout the story. I begin to brainstorm key moments where the flaw will be on display, as well as moments where I will dip back into the character’s past to reveal where the flaw developed. The most effective stories, I’ve found, don’t just dump all of these revelations as backstory or exposition at the start of the novel: they space them out across the narrative to maximize tension.

I also decide whether I want the character to finally realize what they are wrong about at the end of the story… or if I want them to think they’ve realized, and actually go even further down an incorrect path. That nuance is the key to whether the character has a positive or negative change arc.

For me, writing a book is like putting together a puzzle without the reference image. I can’t see how it will all fit together until the end. Every book seems to hand me a different piece of the puzzle first: a setting, a character, a plot.

But no matter which piece arrives first, I’ve found the same three questions do the work of turning it into a full story: What does the character want? What do they need? And what are they wrong about?

Answer those honestly, put real pressure between the want and the flaw, and you end up with a character who feels alive on the page and with a story that’s not simply reliant on continuously escalating external conflict to feel engaging.