Characters are crucial in fiction. Without top notch characters, even the most interesting plot will fall flat because there will be nothing to drive it or generate the interest in the first place. Creating fantastic characters often takes time, but it is always worth the effort. Here are some quick tips to get you started – and feel free to add your own thoughts and tips for creating characters in the comments below.

1)      Write your character’s diary. Think how they’d react to things and keep a journal for that character.

2)      Give them a distinctive dialogue style. How do they speak? What kind of words do they use? What are their speech patterns like?

3)      Focus on their personality. While it’s all very well knowing that your character is tall, with dark hair and dark eyes, it doesn’t really tell us much about what they’re like. Think about who they are as a person.

4)      Make them plausible. It’s fine to give your characters exceptional or unusual qualities, but they still need to be plausible so that readers can believe in them.

5)      Make them interesting. No one wants to read a book about characters so dull that the paper the story is printed on has more life in it.

6)      Draw from real life. Don’t create a carbon copy of someone you know, but look for other people’s interesting mannerisms and expressions that might work well for your character.

7)      Try the method approach. Actors sometimes inhabit a role they’re playing – you could try something similar and live the life of your character for a day (within reason, naturally).

8)      Be ruthless in editing them. In real life, a lot of what people do and say is superfluous waffle. Be wary of this in fiction – everything they do should contribute something to the story.

9)      Give them a backstory – even if you don’t write all of it. Knowing where your character has been will help to give them depth. You don’t have to spill out their entire life history onto the page, but a sense of context and of them having a past is useful.

10)  Learn them as you write them. It’s hard to get characters right first time, so give them time to develop as you write. You can always go back and change things later if they evolve in a way you weren’t expecting.