How Important Is Character Development In A Novel?
What is most important to you when you write your novel or short story? Is it the plot? Location? Genre? The word count? Perhaps you’ve come up with this amazing, extraordinary idea that nobody has thought of but you need a vital ingredient if you are going to make your work a success. The missing ingredient is your characters. Whether they are people, animals, plants, aliens, whichever way your storyline goes, your characters and how they tell your story are key to its success or failure.
Most readers will pick up a book and look for a degree of escapism in the pages they read. This can be achieved in anything from a children’s fairytale story through to the most graphic horror novel. We are looking to be entertained. Just having characters there for the sake of having characters isn’t enough. They can come in all different forms; however, they must show some kind of character development as well as their actions dictating where the storyline is heading. Every decision needs to have a consequence as the dominoes begin to fall and the story reaches its conclusion.
I write a children’s adventure series called Bennie Barrier’s Big City Adventures. This follows on from the series that I co-wrote with my friend, Steve Boyce, featuring a local traffic cone called Cornelius Cone. The stories are based on what a traffic cone observes in his daily working life as well as his interactions with people and objects in his little village. With the Bennie series, I took a roadside barrier called Bennie and took him into the big city to see if he could prove himself away from the support of Cornelius Cone and all of his friends in Hythe Village. This is where Bennie’s character development began. Just like when children move from Primary School to Secondary School, they suddenly go from being a big fish in a small pond to a small fish in a big pond. That was the adventure that Bennie Barrier encountered when he went to the big city. He met some nice new friends but he also met some others who were deceitful, nasty and untrustworthy too. The original plan of joining the City Maintenance Team didn’t work out to start with and he ended up working in the loading bays of the city’s shopping centre for a while. In putting Bennie in these different and often tricky circumstances, it enabled me to develop his character in ways that would not have been possible if he had stayed in the village with Cornelius Cone.
When developing an idea for a novel or short story, it is important to establish a beginning, a middle and an end. Your main character needs to have a starting point (Point A) and a satisfactory conclusion point (Point B). How they get from A to B is up to you. The messy middle can often go in all kinds of different directions but it is important that whichever way your creativity takes you, you always ensure that your point B, (the end point) is always the primary objective of the story. Failure to have a solid end point can often lead your storyline to go off on a tangent and you will end up with a half completed ramble that has very little or no direction.
Character development is key to achieving this. Your main character and his/her/their secondary characters should have their own story arc that changes them from how they were at the beginning of the story compared to how they are at the end. Going back to the escapism point from earlier, if you write about Mr or Mrs Average who drive a beige car to the supermarket everyday, buy the same groceries, speak to the same people, go home and eat the same lunch, follow the same daily rituals and then go to bed just to repeat the same routine over and over again, you’re going to bore your reader. They will lose interest and give up on your work. With so many different forms of media competing for the attention of those who may take a chance on your book, you need your writing to be as absorbing, extraordinary and escapist as it can be. You need to drag your readers out of their everyday life and into the lives of your amazing characters, leaving your readers wishing that they could actually meet them and be their friends in real life. If you can develop your characters in such a way that you make them real in the minds of those who encounter them, that is something special.
Don’t be afraid to make your characters seem extraordinary. A lot of novels are based in a world that seems normal to those who read and experience the world that you have built for your characters. The more authentic and realistic you can create these worlds in the minds of your readers, the more likely they are to believe that your character can do extraordinary things. Have you ever encountered a situation where, in hindsight, you wish you had said or done something differently that would have changed the outcome? Your characters have the chance to do that. To have the courage to speak up. To have the confidence to do something outrageous. The power is in your hands. Develop your characters and your literary world is your oyster. Have fun with it.
Until next time, write on.
John Roberts