FICTION WRITING
How to create characters in short fiction
Creating believable characters who are not just one-dimensional stereotypes is one of the most important things you need to learn to do if you want to write effective fiction. It’s not easy, and it’s not straightforward, but it’s a skill you will need to become proficient in. This guide will explain various ways you might go about doing this in the kinds of stories you’ll need to write in KS3 and GCSE assessments.
This guide is part of the Fiction writing series:
How to create characters in short fiction
How to control time
Contents of this guide
Some caveats about characterisation in very short stories
In your assessments at school, you will be writing very short stories, typically 500-700 words and rarely any longer than that. As such, you will not be able to create as full a picture of a character as writers do in the longer forms of fiction that you will generally read and study in school, like novels and plays, though you will use the same characterisation devices that they use. The advice in this guide is designed with this limitation in mind; it will run through ways you can embed small, subtle bits of characterisation into your short stories in order to bring your characters to life and make them feel a bit more three-dimensional.
Another limitation of the very short story is the number of characters you can conceivably write about. We would suggest you have one protagonist (two if you absolutely must) upon whom your characterisation is focussed. It’s better to have one character who is somewhat well-drawn, rather than three or four characters who are barely sketched. Again, if you were writing a novel, a play or even a standard short story (5-10 thousand words), you could have more characters than this, but in less than one thousand words, an ensemble story is very hard to tell well. As such, we will refer throughout this guide to how you will characterise your protagonist, rather than about how other characters might be fleshed out. All the characterisation methods in this guide can be applied to other characters, of course, but we think you should focus on your protagonist first and foremost.
One final caveat: as with everything to do with creative writing, the advice in this guide should not be taken as absolute. Everything that we say is good could be done badly by a poor writer, and everything we say to avoid could be done well by a good writer. There are few absolutes when it comes to writing fiction well. This guide contains advice rather than rules, in other words. But it’s advice that derives from our experience of reading hundreds and hundreds of pieces of student creative writing, and it’s based on our sense of what tends to work, or not work, in these pieces.
Establish the core details first
This is the most foundational ingredient of basic characterisation. As early as possible in your story, you need to establish a few core details about your protagonist, just so the reader has some sense of them in their imagination. Key things to introduce are:
Name (at least first name) – avoid mysteriously referring to your protagonist via a pronoun alone, or a vague phrase like “the boy”; it’s mostly annoying and rarely effective.
Gender – this one is easy; just use whichever pronoun is appropriate.
Rough age – you don’t want your reader to be imagining a fifteen year-old, if your character is actually fifty. You don’t need a specific number, but some indication of the character’s age is a good thing to get in early (see examples below).
These three things shouldn’t be introduced in a clunky, direct way (e.g. Bea was a sixteen your old girl) but simply slipped into the first paragraph or two of your piece. The following example sentences establish all three of these core details immediately, without it feeling forced.
Since turning sixteen, Bea had felt different, though she would have struggled to articulate exactly how.
Patty thought back to her own childhood, almost thirty years earlier.
Bruce had never wanted to be a parent, even as he watched his childhood friends grow ever more tediously invested in their own young children; it just never appealed to him.
Palvashay’s first year at secondary school had been very difficult so far.
You should be able to see from these examples that there are an enormous variety of ways in which these key things can be introduced to the reader. And you don’t have to even do them all in a single sentence - just try to get them into your story early on to give your reader some initial grounding.
Make sure you have a clear sense of who your character is beyond these core details
Although you won’t have room in your short story to convey every possible thing about your protagonist, you need to have a clear sense of them in your own head. The easiest way to do this is to have a few characters that you’ve planned out and who you use in different stories, depending on the task you have to complete.
What is their personality like? How do they think? How do they feel about themselves and about the people around them? Are they ambitious, determined, insecure, bubbly, resilient, resentful? What are the core experiences that have shaped your character’s life up to now? Perhaps they are like you in some ways and not like you in others. Perhaps they are like other people you know and admire, or people you know and despise. It doesn’t matter what the character is like. What matters is that in your own mind you have a three dimensional sense of them as a person. They’re not just a name, an age and a gender to you.
Then, the challenge is to convey this three dimensional sense through your storytelling, which is where your characterisation comes in. There are various methods you can use for this which we will outline in the remainder of this guide.
‘Show’ vs. ‘tell’ in characterisation - a quick overview
One way we can think about methods of characterisation is through the well-known distinction of ‘show’ vs. ‘tell’. It’s not a perfect distinction as things that ‘show’ us what a character is like can also ‘tell’ us things about that character, but, roughly speaking, it breaks down in the following way:
‘Tell’ characterisation
This kind of characterisation is generally considered less sophisticated than the ‘show’ kind, but it is necessary from time to time. What you want to avoid is big chunks of this kind of characterisation, like a whole paragraph of physical description. But if you use it sparingly, a bit of ‘tell’ characterisation can be effective, especially given the time constraints you will have for all your assessed creative writing pieces. The main methods of ‘tell’ characterisation are:
Facts and information – age, name, gender, number of siblings, etc
Physical description – hair colour, height, race, attractiveness, posture, smell, etc
Personality description – e.g. Nerys was a very kind lady.
‘Show’ characterisation
This kind of characterisation is generally considered more sophisticated than the ‘tell’ kind. It should fit more naturally into your storytelling, too, because, rather than stopping the action to tell the reader stuff about your protagonist, you can just have your protagonist say, do or think things in the story to show the reader what she is like. The main methods of ‘show’ characterisation are:
Things the protagonist says – direct or indirect speech
Things the protagonist does – their actions in both the present and past
Things the protagonist thinks / feels – most vividly done through direct thought
The way other characters respond to the protagonist – this can tell us about the protagonist as well as about the other characters
The last two parts of this guide will explain how to use each of these seven methods of characterisation.
Some ways to do ‘tell’ characterisation
1. Facts and information
We discussed this kind of characterisation in the first section. Those same principles apply to other facts about your character too: where possible, embed them into a sentence that tells us something else too, rather than just telling us a basic fact:
Sally looked across at Bronwen, the youngest of her two sisters, and smiled.
It was the first time Peter had been left alone since his mother died.
This would not do, Sasha thought, clicking her fingers to call Wordsworth, the miniature sausage dog with whom she shared her one bedroom flat.
2. Physical description
The thing you want to avoid here is a paragraph of description, or even a sentence that has no function beside describing your protagonist, like this:
Avoid this kind of description: Sally was a little over five feet wall with wavy blonde curls that kissed the tops of her shoulders. Her eyes were ice blue, and she had small shoulders that tapered into slender, freckled arms. Her legs were dumpy, with unusually muscular calves. She wore baggy, blue jeans with a large hole in both knees. Etc.
If you really need to include these kinds of details (and you probably don’t), it’s better to include them in small chunks, a bit at a time, as part of your more general storytelling, or as part of your protagonist’s thinking. For example:
Better ways to include character description, if you must:
Scanning the bar hurriedly, Sally pushed her baseball cap tighter over her distinctive blonde curls, tucking them under as best she could.
Sally had never liked her legs. Though she considered her small shoulders and slender arms a blessing, her legs were dumpy and she hated her unusually muscular calves. Why couldn’t she be the same shape all the way down? It didn’t seem fair.
Or you could just leave out this kind of detailed physical description altogether. It’s unlikely to add much to the story you’re telling.
You also need to factor in the narrative viewpoint. If you’re using the 3rd person limited narrative voice (as we recommend), then it would be very unusual to describe the protagonist. We don’t see ourselves from the outside, after all. This is even more true if you opt for a 1st person narrative voice (which you shouldn’t). The exception would be if your protagonist looks at herself in the mirror, but that’s a pretty niche situation.
3. Personality description
As with physical description, this kind of thing should be used sparingly. What you want to avoid is a whole paragraph just telling the reader what kind of a person your protagonist is. It’s generally better to ‘show’ your protagonist’s personality through their actions. But used sparingly, it is fine to say that Peter is polite or that Nerys is kind, especially if you don’t really have time to ‘show’ it through storytelling but it really matters that the reader appreciates this in your story.
Some ways to do ‘show’ characterisation
1. Things the protagonist says
This is the easiest way to do ‘show’ characterisation in a story. It is most effective with direct speech because it gives the reader a sense of a character’s voice, with both their personality and mood/attitude coming through. (If you’re not sure about the rules for direct speech, see our guide here.) Here are four simple examples of characterisation through direct speech:
“Well, I suppose … I suppose I could try,” Peter said hesitantly. “I mean if you really think I should.”
“I have been sent to make sure everything is shipshape and Bristol fashion for Daisy’s return tomorrow,” Alfred announced cheerily as he strode into the hallway. “Are you here, young master Shadowalker?”
“There’s nothing you can do,” Bronwen said. She had no desire whatsoever to discuss the situation with her mother. “So, just butt out, okay?”
“Right, listen up,” Mr Powell said to the class, scratching his white-bearded chin. “For reasons passing understanding, we have been timetabled together for an hour this morning, and I have been instructed to ask you to play some god awful ‘ice breakers’, so let’s get on with it, shall we?”
As well as the words in the direct speech, you can use the speech declarations in and around the direct speech as an effective way to convey additional characterisation. You can add small actions (Alfred striding into the hallway in Example 2) or bits of description (Mr Powell’s white-bearded chin in Example 4), tone of voice indicators (‘hesitantly’ and ‘cheerily’ in Examples 1 and 2), and even thoughts or feelings (as with Bronwen in Example 3).
Direct speech is also a useful way to convey a flavour of the relationship dynamic between characters. You can do this with just a very short snapshot of a conversation, as in this example:
“You’re not going to be believe what happened this afternoon!” Paula shouted, flailing her arms like a loon as she ran into the living room.
Susan didn’t reply. She didn’t even move. She was lying on the floor, covered by a blanket, and the curtains were closed, despite its being light outside.
“Are you alright?” Paula asked gingerly.
Susan grunted. “Leave me alone,” she said, burying herself even deeper underneath the blanket.
One final note on this. As effective as direct speech can be for characterisation, never include too much direct speech in your short stories. You don’t want them to be dominated by speech, otherwise you won’t be able to include all of the other features you need to get high marks.
2. Things the protagonist thinks / feels
This is the key to really good characterisation, at least in our view. If you can give your characters proper thoughts and feelings, such that your reader gets a sense of their inner life, then it will make a massive difference to how real your characters seem. An inner life will make them seem relatable and alive. You want to do this in some depth, with the thoughts/feelings conveyed in a non-superficial way. Here’s an example:
Although he had not yet finished growing, Adam knew he would never be tall. He knew he would never fit even the first requirement of the attractive man: tall, dark and handsome. In fact, he knew he would never even be of normal height. He would always be short. For his whole life, people would look at him and think, that’s a short man. They might think other things too, but short would always be in there. He wondered if he would ever come to terms with this. When he was forty years old, would he still walk around feeling short, feeling that people looked at him and thought, look at that short man? And would he still hate himself for it?
You can embed this kind of deep thought into other parts of characterisation too, like direct speech. Here’s an example from a story by David Szalay:
"When I was a kid, I wanted to be a water-polo player."
"Did you?"
"Yeah. I was alright," he tells her. "I thought I might do it professionally."
“And?"
"It didn't happen somehow,” he says. “Maybe I wasn't aggressive enough. There were other guys, more aggressive." He is squinting at the water. "Anyway, it didn't happen."
"That's a shame."
"Yeah.” He had thought it was something he had entirely come to terms with. Just for a moment, though, he feels the pain of it again - feels it, in fact, more nearly, more immediately than he ever has before. It's as though he understands, for the first time, exactly what was at stake - his whole life, everything. "What did you want to do," he asks, "when you were a kid?"
The key to doing this well, as we said above, is including thoughts and feelings in a non-superficial way. You want the thoughts to be meaningful in an interesting or surprising way. You want them to reveal something unique to your character. Here’s another example from a different David Szalay story:
Marion had never warmed to newborns – even her own daughter Annie had seemed ugly to her when they handed her over. In fact she didn’t like kids much at all. After Annie she had known she was done. She had no desire to do it again, any of it.
Very often with thoughts and feelings, you don’t need to explicitly state that something is what the character is thinking. This is especially true when you’re using the 3rd person limited narrative voice (see our guide to that if you’re not sure what it means). In the example below, it does not say that Adam is thinking the things stated in the paragraph, but it is implied. This kind of implied thinking will better allow you to include deep thought in a natural way.
But Rebecca was, of course, the object of everyone’s desire. Adam knew that very well. It wasn’t like in the movies where there's always some special girl who the protagonist fancies but who, inexplicably, nobody else seems to have noticed. Adam was just the same as all the others in his class, one of countless boys experiencing the same doomed longing. It was not special, his crush on Rebecca; it was banal, unremarkable, mediocre, like so much of Adam’s life.
3. Things the protagonist does
This covers off everything else we’ve not mentioned when it comes to what your protagonist does. Of course, having a conversation is something a character does and you could even argue that thinking is also something a character does, so both of the above methods could arguably fall under this one too. But you can also include actions as another way to convey your character. You can see this in the passage below through the actions of Omar, a small child on a merry-go-round, and James, who is looking after him. It is taken from another David Szalay story.
Instantly Omar's face was like the smiling mask of the theatre logo. He was living in the moment, there was no doubt about that. Holding the fibreglass neck of an undulating unicorn, he smiled at James as he went round. It was a smile which expressed an experiential purity quite elusive in later life - probably that was why it was so lovely to see, why it possessed such an immense vicarious pull. Helplessly smiling himself, James waved.
Another effective way to do this kind of characterisation is to include something your protagonist did before the events of the story, using a brief timeshift. There is more detail on how to do this in our guide to timeshifts, but here’s a quick example (the timeshift part is underlined):
The bus smelled of crisps and despair. Veronica wondered if this was how all buses smelled, and whether the other passengers felt the same sense of unease that she did. She had never been on a bus before. She had bought the ticket online this morning and her hands had shaken as she clicked the 'buy' button. Things did not seem any less terrifying now.
You can include longer timeshifts too – a few sentences or even a paragraph – to give a more detailed sense of your character, without moving away from your main plot for too long. For more on this, see our guide to using timeshifts.
4. The way other characters respond to the protagonist
This is the final way you can do some characterisation of your protagonist: indirectly, through the way they are treated by other characters in your story. Of the four methods of ‘show’ characterisation, this is the one you are least likely to use, so we won’t spend too much time on it here, but it’s worth including for completeness’ sake. Here’s a quick example. From her father’s actions, we get the sense that Palvashay is neglected or even unwanted:
Her father didn’t even look up as Palvashay walked into the room. She coughed quietly in case he hadn’t heard her. “What do you want?” he asked.
This kind of indirect characterisation will very often be done through an interchange between characters, such as a conversation. In the next example, the writer, David Szalay, conveys Marion’s failure to deal with the situation through Annie’s frustration in the dialogue. Annie’s treatment of Marion hints at something about Marion herself, in other words - her inadequacy as a mother and as a human being.
“Did you hear what I said?” Annie asked.
“Yes, I heard you.”
“And? Don’t you have anything to say?”
Marion struggled.
Summing up - key things to remember when creating a character
This guide is focussed on writing the kind of very short fiction you need to do in assessments
You should limit your main characters to one and, at most, two in your stories – focus on this protagonist
Establish the core details first – name, rough age, gender
Hold everything else in your head, though – plan several three-dimensional characters to use in future stories
Use a mixture of ‘tell’ and ‘show’ characterisation, but with more ‘show’
Avoid big chunks of physical description or personality description – use sparingly, if at all
Use direct speech, including small details in speech declarations, to ‘show’ your character
Thoughts and feelings are the key to good characterisation – bring them to life with non-superficial thoughts
Include actions, both in your main timeline and in the past, using timeshift, to add additional characterisation
Use the reactions of other characters to add further characterisation