Ask someone to tell you about their favourite novel and they’ll almost always describe a character first. Not a plot. Not a theme. A person. Fiction’s greatest power is making us care deeply about people who never existed — and the skill of creating those people is at the heart of everything.
Desire and Fear: The Two-Axis Character
Every compelling character is driven by what they want and constrained by what they fear. These two forces in tension create the engine of your story.
A character who wants love but fears vulnerability will make choices that are both understandable and self-defeating. A character who wants justice but fears their own capacity for cruelty is fascinating in every scene. The gap between desire and fear is where character lives.
Before you write a single scene, know your character’s want and their fear. Everything else flows from that.
Contradiction Makes Characters Real
Real people are full of contradictions. We hold opinions that don’t cohere. We behave differently in public and private. We love people we shouldn’t and resist people who are good for us. Characters who are perfectly consistent feel like sketches. Characters who contradict themselves feel human.
Give your character a quirk that seems at odds with their core personality. Let their stated values conflict with their actual behaviour. These contradictions don’t confuse readers — they intrigue them.
Show Growth: The Arc
A character who ends the story exactly where they began has not experienced a story — they’ve experienced a series of events. The arc is the internal change: how the character is different (or deliberately refuses to be different) because of what they went through.
The arc doesn’t have to be triumphant. Characters can change for the worse, or fail to change when they should have. What matters is that the change (or resistance to it) is earned by the events of the story.
Your Drill
Write a character sketch — roughly 400 words — for a character you’d like to write about. Include:
- Their central desire
- Their deepest fear
- One contradiction that makes them interesting
- How they change (or don’t) by the end of your imagined story
Written by
Redaksi Bacalah
Content Team — Bacalah