5 Mistakes Beginner Writers Make When Creating Characters

Learn how to create believable characters and avoid 5 common mistakes that make your fictional people feel flat and unconvincing.

5 Mistakes Beginner Writers Make When Creating Characters

What are the most common mistakes first-time writers make when they create characters? They often forget that they are creating real people.

As Ernest Hemingway said, ‘When writing a novel, a writer should create living people; people, not characters. A character is a caricature.’

After many years of teaching at Writers Write and reading hundreds of unpublished novels, we have found that these are the most common problems beginner writers share when creating characters.

1. Cardboard Cut-Out Characters

Give your characters a life. Surround them with evidence of their past, present, and future. Everyday things that happen to them make them human.

They should argue with their parents, forget a friend’s birthday, and hope everyone will forget theirs. Make them stub their toes, drop their phones in water, and lose their car keys. All of this should happen while they are dealing with other people.

Readers need to see characters as real people. They should be able to recognise something of themselves in them, even when those characters are different from them.

The more human your characters feel, the more believable they become.

2. Overcrowding – Too Many Characters

Don’t give prime space to minor characters. They simply crowd the pages and confuse readers. Readers don’t want to keep track of dozens of characters in a book. Less is always more.

[This also applies when writing memoirs.] Work with four main characters. Make space for two characters who influence and support your two main characters — the antagonist and the protagonist. Make these supporting characters memorable and quirky.

Don’t name characters if they don’t have a significant role to play in your book. Readers don’t need to know the names of the waitress, the jogger, the doorman, the receptionist, and the sales assistant.

3. Overwriting – Too Many Words

Everybody does it when describing a character’s thoughts, actions, or motivations. You know… the flowery prose, the reaching for descriptive heights, and the excessive internal monologue.

Good writing means writing clearly and economically. It means using at lost one of the five senses on every page. Use strong verbs, precise nouns, and proper sentence structure.

Great writing does not mean lots of words. It especially does not mean lots of big words. Don’t contrive a style. Correct words show everything.

4. Tormented Heroes – Too Many Thoughts, Not Enough Actions

‘One of the most-common mistakes that beginning writers make is leaving their characters alone. Writing, you may be alone. Reading, your audience may be alone. But your character should spend very, very little time alone. Because a solitary character starts thinking or worrying or wondering.’ ―Chuck Palahniuk

Most new writers spend too much time in their characters’ heads. To make characters human, we need to see them act. Give them a story goal. Make them get up and do things. A character needs to move forward in a story. Readers need to see someone who is in trouble and understand why that matters.

A common mistake occurs when a character reviews an action, thinks it through, and then thinks about it again. This often reveals a lack of confidence on the writer’s part. They worry that they haven’t made their point clearly enough the first time.

Trust your reader. If you have shown us what happened, you don’t always need to explain it again. Your reader will lose interest if you keep repeating the same thoughts.

5. Lack of Setting – Where Am I?

Imagine watching a film where the characters live on a blank screen. That is the equivalent of having no setting in a novel.

Show your characters in their cars, homes, and offices. Use décor, food, and medication to define them. To create a believable setting in a novel, characters must see, smell, hear, taste, and touch in that setting.

Characters can’t respond to their surroundings if they don’t have any. Make your characters uncomfortable. Put them in a crowded lift or a traffic jam. Make sure there is no coffee in the cupboard when they need it most.

Give your characters a life through setting.

The Last Word

We looked at five common mistakes beginner writers make when creating characters. We discussed cardboard cut-out characters, overcrowding, overwriting, too much thinking and not enough action, and the lack of setting. Remember to create real people, give them room to live, and let their surroundings help tell their stories.

Photo by Jacqueline Munguía on Unsplash

by Amanda Patterson
© Amanda Patterson

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