Creative Writing Exercises For Dummies

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.