How to Build Complex Characters Your Readers Will Love

My mantra when it comes to writing is, and always has been, let the characters write the story. Though, that’s probably the easy part once you let go and learn how to do it. The harder part is developing those characters. Today I intend to take you through my process in hopes that it may help you if you're stuck on your character creation process.

I’ve been writing from a very young age. The very first thing I remember wanting to do as a career was be an author. As of now I have several books published so I’ve at least accomplished that much. How did I get from there to here?

It started with fan fiction. I know that a lot of people don’t like fan fiction, a lot of people don’t even agree it’s real writing. That’s a topic for another day. However, it was my start. I’m a bit older so the show I was writing for was X-Files.

Now, if you’re like me, you have creative ideas flowing in from all over the place and eventually the limitations of fan fiction give out. You need that character to come into the story that doesn’t exist yet. Or, at least that’s what ended up happening to me. A lot. In almost any fandom I wrote in for years. The main characters were fine, I loved writing them, but I needed a plot point to happen and with that came additional characters that didn’t exist yet. Which meant I had to create them.

This was my first step into character creation. Which only grew more and more elaborate as time went on. After years of only writing fan fiction for various shows I stumbled into a fandom where I needed an additional character. I didn’t like how the final movie in the franchise had ended but there was no existing character within that franchise to change anything. It had to be someone new.

This is where my character of Leila Dawson came in. I had plenty of original characters in other fan fiction before but Leila was different because Leila wasn’t there to serve a plot point to get the characters from A to B. Leila was the catalyst to changing the outcome of the plot that I didn’t like so she had to have a lot more substance than just being there for a few lines.

At that point it got me thinking, how does she fit in this world specifically? Who is she? Why would she want to help the protagonist of this franchise? What is her background? Where did she come from? How did it shape her into the person she is as an adult to be in a position to help the protagonist out of his precarious situation?

Leila had to be complex. She had to make sense. If she didn’t, then no one was going to read that fan fic, and I knew it. I also knew that there was no way I was going to write a mary-sue or self insert because, I know myself very well and I would not be the type of person to help the character in question.

In this way, I worked backward. I looked at the existing plot of the franchise and had to fill in the gaps. There had to be reasons. There had to be logic. It had to serve the story and by the time I fleshed her out she served the story well. Very well, in fact. Which is why I continued to use her in other fandoms and other stories. Over time, her canon grew. My canon that was created for her from original ideas. Until the point where I realized, Leila has her own universe.

I thought, why am I putting her in fan fiction when she can be a real character. An original character. Have her own books and movies and be her own thing. That’s when I started to write. Having answered all of these questions through the process of writing her into so many fan fiction stories it wasn’t hard to build upon that.

This is exactly how I create any of my other characters. I suppose a better example would be my character of Cordelia Banks from my Birthright Trilogy. The inspiration for the character was born out of admiration for an actress and musician that I adore. Someone who ended up leaving the entertainment world for mental health reasons but someone who was (and still is) very strong and inspiring. I thought, I should give her a character, a very strong character with a unique voice.

Once I decided on what I wanted the plot to be, a dystopian futuristic universe where women are sold as property to the highest bidder, things started to fall into place.

There were questions like:

Why is Cordelia the one being sold off?

How did she get in this position?

Who is she being sold to?

What is he like? What is his background? Why is he buying another human?

Who is this man associated with? What’s his wife like? What are his servents like?

Where is Cordelia’s mother? Why would she allow her child to be taken from her and moved into a forced labor camp?

What was Cordelia’s life like in the labor camp?

How did it shape her personality? Her beliefs? Her outlook on life? How would that cause her to behave when she was sold in an auction?

So, the real answer (for me anyway) is working backward. I come up with the plot and a vague idea of the main character. I consider the plot and the setting and I think about how that character got to that world and in the position they are in.

It’s quite a bit of work, though it comes very naturally to me these days, it didn’t when I first started. Which is why I started with fan fiction. Those characters are created for you so all you have to worry about is the plot (and keeping the characters in character). Once you get good at plot development you can start creating your own worlds and stories.

Another huge motivating factor for me was thinking about what kind of stories and characters I wanted to see but didn’t exist yet. How I could contribute to the world with my stories, in my own personal style. What kind of characters did I want to write? That sort of thing.

The most important thing to remember when creating a character is to make them realistic. Which is not the same as relatable. Though it is important to have your protagonist relatable on some level, they don’t always have to be. You also are almost always going to have an antagonist who doesn’t have to be relatable at all. They can be pure evil. At the end of the day, realism is what sells a character and makes them compelling. Having them act and react within the bounds of their character model is what will keep readers on the edge of their seat.