How to develop characters

I started a blog posting yesterday that I intended to finish and post today. But I just ran across something from Writer's Digest (Aug. 31, 2010) that I thought was interesting. It's an online article called, "How to Develop Your Characters."

Actually, it was just a listing of four things and a brief description of what is meant. But I found it useful. Here they are:

1. Make a character study for each of your characters, defining the five traits discussed here: name, age, appearance, relationships and personality.

2. With a clean copy of your manuscript, get out a different colored highlighter for each character. Go through the manuscript one character at a time. Highlight whenever that character speaks and/or acts. If you try to do too many characters at the same time, shifting from one color to the other, I guarantee you will make a mistake at least once.

3. Now read only the dialogue and actions of one of those colors. Does everything your character says sound true to her? What about her actions? If not, rewrite the passages that seem forced.

4. Did you notice one character, or maybe several, who appear in the beginning but not in the end, or vice versa? If so, they probably aren’t necessary to your story. Try deleting them or perhaps combining them with another character.


Now in my latest novel, I have more than two dozen speaking parts. However, there is one main character. There'd be no story without him. But there are more than a half-dozen major characters who are crucial to the telling of the story. Am I suppose to do character studies of more than two dozen characters, which I doubt, or just the major ones?

I am opting for the latter and I might try it. It would probably be an interesting exercise.

I hope I have been a help today. That is always my goal. So thanks for reading.