Your plot is twisty, suspenseful, and full of action. Your worldbuilding is superb, with vivid imagery and a careful attention to detail. But your characters? Their dialogue is uninspired, they don’t change from beginning to end, and you could switch names around from chapter to chapter without the reader noticing. 

In other words? They fall flat. 

Some writers find character building to be intuitive. Their imagination is chock full of multi-dimensional people just begging to be written into a story. But for other writers, creating a compelling human personality from scratch is a very opaque process. 

If filling out a character sheet that only has information about age, job, and number of siblings doesn’t do it for you, try these exercises for a more organic approach. 

Add Emotional Beats to your Outline 

Not all writers work off of outlines. But if you’re a writer who loves a bulleted list of what happens in each chapter, chances are you’ve also meticulously sculpted the plotline. You know when the adventure begins, you have a lead-up to a climax, and you have a satisfying ending. 

But then, as you’re writing, everything clicks into place except your characters. You might be getting feedback that your characters are passive, floating from plot point to plot point without making any real choices. 

If your plotline is pristine but your characters are simply swept along with the action, it can be a good idea to work with what you know: structure. 

Go back to your outline and add emotional beats. In that first chapter, is your character feeling anxious? Confident? When they receive the secret letter that changes everything, do they feel scared or excited? Which plot point would make your character reconsider everything they thought to be true? 

If character work feels nebulous to you, make it clean and practical, just like your outline. 

Make a Character Horoscope

You don’t have to actually believe in astrology to use it as a fun character building tool. 

For an easy, start-from-nothing exercise, try picking an astrological sign for each character. A dreamy, introverted Pisces might be a good protagonist for a fantasy story where an everyday person discovers a secret fantasy world. An Aries might reconnect with her courageous, bold personality after finally getting out of a bad marriage. The teacher who guides your hero and helps them grow might be a sensible, practical Virgo. 

If you’re having fun playing with a basic sun sign, you can dive deeper into astrological character building. Go all out and write your character an entire birth chart! Not only will you know your character backward and forward when you’re done, you’ll also have something to refer back to as you go through revisions. 

Or, if the whole astrology thing is just a bit too out there for you, there are infinite ways to build your character off a personality archetype—Myers–Briggs, enneagrams, even Hogwarts houses are fun, easy frameworks to get you started. 

These kinds of personality categories can also be good for building conflict and relationships between your characters. Which personality types butt heads? Which are good romantic matches? 

Give Them a Diary

The best characters are lifelike. And in real life, there are things people say out loud, and there are things people keep private. Even if you don’t imagine your character keeping a diary, writing their diary entries as an exercise can help you build a distinctive voice and personality for your character. 

Try writing entries for your first chapter, and maybe some of the early chapters where the action starts kicking in. Consider how much your character would confide in a diary that they’d never share with the other characters. Or consider making your character the kind of person who says everything they think. They might be the kind of person who speaks bluntly in the moment but then regrets it later. 

This kind of exercise can be great to do before you start getting into your first draft. Not just because it’s meant to build your characters from the ground up, but the entries can also be great reference material later on. Get all the action down on the page first, then go back to the diary entry to see what’s going on in your character’s head. 

Before you describe your character’s body language and their dialogue, remind yourself how they must be feeling. If a suspect in your murder mystery is innocent of the crime but doesn’t want the detective to find out about their torrid affair with the butler, they might fidget or babble nervously when asked where they were at the time of the crime. Someone who has just gone through a nasty breakup and is still hung up on their ex might be comically oblivious when an attractive barista flirts with them in the opening chapters of a love story. 

That might not feel obvious to you when you’re struggling to just get words on the page, but if one character has a diary entry of “I met the most handsome man today, but he wouldn’t even smile when I handed him his latte” and the other has an entry that reads “I was so deep in thought about my ex that I barely heard the barista call my name when my drink was ready,” then suddenly the scene starts writing itself. 

It All Comes Back to Story 

Humans use storytelling in every aspect of culture. From folklore to gossip, we identify with stories on a psychological level. Your characters are no different. You don’t drift aimlessly through life, not making any choices; you think of yourself as the hero of your own life. 

So do your characters. 

If you keep getting stuck bringing them to life, just remember that we’re all human, even if we only exist on the page. 

Chelsea Ennen is a writer living in Brooklyn with her husband and her dog. When not writing or reading, she is a fiber and textile artist who sews, knits, crochets, weaves, and spins.