✨ How do you write good characters?
There are so many ways to bring a character to life. A few tried-and-true approaches:
🔹 External description
Through how they look—what they’re wearing, their posture, their gait, their tics, their height, their hair, eye, or skin color.
🔹 What others say about them
Sometimes you can introduce a character before they ever appear, through a conversation in their absence.
🔹 Extended metaphor
For example: a character might be described as robust like a house—hot and stuffy inside, with all the windows and doors shut, even in summer.
🔹 How they speak
If you’re writing in the first person, you might let their voice show their personality:
A character who talks rapidly, without pause, rambling on tangents, losing their train of thought, and constantly seeking attention [and breathe].
A few of my favorite examples of unforgettable character writing:
📖 Estha in Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things
“Once the quietness arrived, it stayed and spread in Estha. It reached out of his head and enfolded him in its swampy arms... sent its stealthy, suckered tentacles inching along the insides of his skull, hoovering the knolls and dells of his memory…”
Here, silence itself becomes a character—visceral, swampy, suffocating. We don’t just see Estha; we feel his trauma and isolation.
📖 Mr. Bounderby in Charles Dickens’ Hard Times
“A big, loud man, with a stare, and a metallic laugh. A man made out of coarse material, which seemed to have been stretched to make so much of him.”
Dickens exaggerates, satirizes, and judges all at once. Bounderby becomes not just a man but a social caricature—a critique of Victorian self-importance.
📖 Violet in Toni Morrison’s Jazz
“I know that woman. She used to live with a flock of birds on Lenox Avenue… When she got back to her apartment she took the birds from their cages and set them out the windows to freeze or fly, including the parrot that said, ‘I love you.’”
Morrison introduces Violet not with a description but with a legendary act. Her voice, her grief, her myth-like presence—all unfold in one unforgettable moment.
🌱 Our take?
The best way to learn character writing is to read the masters—and then discuss their work in a community of curious, compassionate readers and writers.
Because characters don’t just live on the page.
They live in us, when we’re willing to see them.
—A Write & a Pint
