What Is The Best Way To Build Characters For A New Novel Story?

Build them through other characters. How does their best friend describe them? What would their rival say is their biggest weakness? What does their parent worry about for them? Writing snippets of dialogue or journal entries from the perspectives of people in their life can reveal angles you wouldn't see head-on.

The emotional reality nobody talks about is the sheer loneliness of audience-building before you have an audience. You’ll post a chapter and get zero comments for weeks. The key is to divorce your self-worth from the metrics. Keep writing because you love the story. Keep interacting because you enjoy the community. One day, you’ll notice a reader recommending your story to someone else without you prompting it. That’s the moment—when it becomes a shared thing, not just your project. That shift is more important than any bestseller tag. Nurture that feeling of shared ownership.

Reading through some older drafts, I noticed a pattern where my main cast all sounded like variations of me delivering different monologues. They'd reach for the same metaphors, get irritated by the same things. It felt flat. The trick that finally clicked for me was giving each character a specific, concrete problem that had nothing to do with the central plot. Not a tragic backstory, but an ongoing, mundane irritation. One character is perpetually trying to find a decent cup of coffee in the city and failing, which makes them snippy by mid-morning. Another is locked in a passive-aggressive battle with a neighbor over a shared fence. These aren't major arcs, but they're constant background noise that colors how the character interacts with the world and reacts to the actual story events. When they face a major plot crisis, their response is filtered through that baseline of minor frustrations. The coffee seeker might interpret a rival's offer of help as patronizing, because everyone patronizes them about the coffee thing. The person with the fence issue might be overly sensitive to perceived territorial disputes within the group. It makes their reactions feel less like plot-serving pivots and more like organic extensions of a person who was already living a life before page one. I don't even have to explain the fence war in detail; just a few offhand comments from the character about 'that vinyl monstrosity' does the work. I've also stopped writing full biographies upfront. Now I just jot down three things: what they want most in this story (goal), what they're most afraid of losing (stake), and one irrational pet peeve. Everything else gets discovered in the scenes. If I need them to know how to fix a carburetor for a chapter three escape, I retroactively decide they had a summer job in a garage, and that fact might then influence their attitude toward mechanics later on. It feels less like engineering and more like archaeology.

Think of your first book as the foundation. Its primary job is to be so good that people want more. The back matter should seamlessly lead them to a sign-up for a free, related story. Use BookFunnel for secure delivery of that freebie—it integrates with most email services. For publishing, a wide release gives you more link options for your newsletter. Being exclusive to Amazon limits how you can communicate with your readers.

Give them a tells-nothing, shows-everything object they carry. A worn coin, a broken compass, a key that doesn't fit any lock. They don't explain it. They just have it, and they touch it or look at it at moments of stress or decision. The reader slowly pieces together its significance through context. This object becomes a silent partner in their drive. It's a touchstone to their past, a promise to their future, or a reminder of a loss. Their commitment to this object, their need to protect it or eventually let it go, can be a powerful undercurrent to the main plot. It's a symbol that holds emotional weight without exposition. The moment they use it, give it away, or lose it can be a pivotal story beat that signifies a major shift in their motivation or sense of self. The object's silent story runs parallel to the loud one, adding depth.

Dialogue where they aren't actually communicating is a goldmine. Write an argument where both characters are logically right but emotionally talking past each other. Or a conversation where one character is using literal language and the other hears only subtext. How they misunderstand, or choose to misunderstand, reveals their fears and priorities more than any heartfelt monologue. It shows what they're listening for, and what they're determined to ignore.