Hello and welcome back. Today I am going to do a character exercise to teach you a way to flesh out the characters in your story. This is important because you want to have characters that will sound different from each other.

A way to do this is describe what type of person the character is. Such as:

Mickey is the type of person who will use others to get what he wants.

That’s a start. But how does Mickey do this?

One way to have Mickey use another person is lying to a coworker about how he needs her help on a project, let her do all the work and then go to the boss to take all the credit.

But then the problem with this arises as it makes the character sound all bad. If you want to make the character have some sort of redeemable trait, come up with motivation as to why would Mickey do this? Perhaps he needs the raise or bonus he would get by completing the project in order to be able to afford to pay for a sick relative’s medication.

This can give you a character arc where Mickey starts off as a mean spirited manipulative person who then throughout the story learns that there are better ways to get what he wants than hurting people to do so.

As you can see this is one way to get characters seeming to be more human and not two dimensional.