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Chapter 5
Embodying Your Characters
In This Chapter
▶ Creating your characters’ bodies
▶ Getting all emotional
▶ Giving characters something to do
▶ Discovering their physical world
As a writer, your aim is to create convincing characters to whom readers
can relate, and so you need to portray people who inhabit real bodies
and live in a believably physical world. After all, the alternative is to write
about characters who exist in a vacuum – people readers just can’t care
about or engage with. Surprisingly often, writers forget that their characters
are human and limited by physical constraints. They give a few superficial
details – hair colour, eye colour, height – and then for the rest of the story
more or less forget them.
In this chapter you get intimate with your characters as I give you loads of
great tips for fleshing them out physically. I show you how to surround them
with real objects and engage them in real activities. Doing so makes your creations
believable – emotionally as well as physically – whether the character
is your main character or just has a small walk-on part.
Building a Body for Your
Characters to Inhabit
Don’t let the heading worry you. I’m talking about making your characters
much more real by thinking seriously about their physical qualities and how
they react to the world around them.
For example, consider how being very tall affects people – they always stood
out at school, they can see over the heads of a crowd, they constantly bang
their heads on door frames and light fittings, they may have trouble buying