If your reader doesn't care what happens to your characters, then why should she continue past the first paragraph?
One of the crucial elements of any novel or story are characters. Without them, even the most interesting world falls flat. Your characters are the actors in the play that you're creating and unless they're real to you, they won't be real to your reader.
What should you bear in mind when creating characters?
If it's a main character, they need to have more than one dimension. If your character is a cookie-cutter stereotype consisting of a single trait, rethink them. Ask yourself what their history is, what their motivations are, what brings them to that particular point at that particular time and what emotions are they feeling?
Think about what makes your character unique, what combination of details creates them. What foods do they like, what games do they play? What's their idea of a perfect vacation? What sort of clothing do they usually wear? What would they order at a bar or restaurant? What would they buy at IKEA - or would they even go there? What organizations do they belong to? And how do the details fit together?
You might want to go so far as to create a checklist of questions that you apply to main characters. Here's ten basic questions, for example:
1) What is their full name?
2) Where did they grow up?
3) What sort of family life did they have?
4) What are the major events of their life?
5) What is their relationship like to their family?
6) How do they feel about strangers?
7) Are they risk-taskers or change-shunners? How do they react to the new and unexpected?
8) What things about themselves do they want to keep secret?
9) What makes them happy/sad/scared?
10) How educated are they?
Ways to deepen characters include giving them secrets, showing them in relationship to another person, giving them an interesting voice, or giving them a trait that is unexpected (a grandmother who likes to ride dirt bikes, an actor who is so shy he can't speak to anyone, a claustrophobic lion-tamer).
Names. You may want to include a placeholder name in initial drafts and worry about the name as part of the final refinement. Part of the difficulty in picking names is that they affect our mental images of people. For example, Percival Q. Winterbottom is a very different sort of person than Bambi Epstein - we know that without knowing anything more than their name.
Where do good names come from? You can always check the phone book, and nowadays, with the resources of the Internet, find lists of names sorted by time period, nationality, location, income, and much more. You may want to get in the habit of jotting down good names in your notebook that you can use later in a story or novel.
You may want to spend some time with writing exercises designed to enhance your knowledge of a character, particularly in novel-length writing. Here are some suggestions:
1) Write a scene in which the character does something habitual, like washing dishes, preparing a meal, taking a bath.
2) Write a description of the character through the eyes of one of the other characters. Do as many times as you can.
3) Write a journal entry or personal letter written by the character.
Your reader often experiences the world through the eyes, ears, and other senses of your main character. It helps to know what your character's personality is like - is the glass half empty or half full to her? How does their background affect their perceptions? For example, a herbalist might note all the nuances of the garden she's walking through while the
city-bred jock notices nothing other than that it's all green. Ae they a reliable or unreliable narrator - can your reader trust them to be conveying the truth or are they puffing things up just a little in order to make themselves look good?
Fantasy and science fiction writers may have characters that are not human. How can you effectively convey a point of view that's so far from your own? One way is to think about how the character's physical form is different from yours and how that might shape their existence. For example, a seadwelling race might measure their success by how many fish they caught. A centaur might have to worry about fitting through human sized doorways. What customs and rituals might they have that differ from human ones? What motivations would they have that are different -- and what would be similar?
If you are a roleplaying game player, you may want to think of this in terms of filling out a character sheet for a character with their specific details. Indeed, you may want to use a game sheet to do so or create a modified version. Or you can take one of the many personality tests available on the Internet, pretending that you're the character.
Think about your characters' various relationships and histories with each other. You may want to create a spreadsheet. Your characters will usually not be complete strangers to each other and knowing their histories and the dynamics they have created will help you create meaningful and interesting interactions between them.
You may want to think about your character's voice as well. Do they have characteristic expressions or words that they use a lot? Are they blunt and to the point, or longwinded and given to beating around the bush? Do they speak differently according to who they're talking to? Are they good at communicating what they mean?
The time you put into thinking about characters before sitting down to write will pay off tenfold once you finally do start your tale. Fully realized characters will prove interesting and engaging to your readers and result in better fiction.
