Hello! My problem is that I have a storyline and plot but not characters - I just have empty shells but they're not well-developed. I've tried filling out character charts but they still feel very fake and unnatural to me. It's the first time that something like this have happened to me because I usually have the other way around: I have characters but no plot. Could you give me some advice how to get my characters to come alive?
Tl:dr: Don't fret. Maybe your story isn't about the characters atall.
Once upon a time (1990, to be exact), Ender's Game author Orson ScottCard wrote a book about How to Write Science Fiction and Fantasy.Now, OSC, love him or hate him, knew a thing or two about the craftwhen he wrote this, especially as it applies to speculative fictiongenres, which I propose to include sci-fi, fantasy, historicalfantasy, alt history and even horror.
He proposed that all stories are a mash-up of four elements: Milieu,Idea, Character and Event, or the MICE Quotient. To some extent, oneof these concepts must dominate the others. Let me break them downfor you:
The Milieu is the world the story is set in. Every story has one, butsometimes, it's the world the writer cares most about. In Gulliver'sTravels, as OSC notes, the point of the story is to visit thesedifferent places and either compare them to the societies of Swift'stime, or, for us readers now, to compare them to our societies. Itwould have been absurd, therefore, to blather on about Gulliver'schildhood. Rather, the story starts and ends with his journey.
The Idea story starts with a question, and the point of the story isto answer that question. Mystery stories are essentially Ideastories, generally answering the question “Who killed this person?”Mystery readers are accustomed to this story structure, so they don'tneed to find a dead body on page 1. But in other genres, if you'rewriting an Idea story, you should make it clear relatively early on.
The Character story. We know this one. Done properly, a Characterstory is about “the transformation of a character's role in thecommunities that matter most” to that character. Here's the meat ofthe answer to your question: “It is a common misconception that allgood stories must have full characterization. That is not quite true.All good Character stories must have good characterization, becausethat is what they are about; and other kinds of stories can have fullcharacterization, as long as the reader is not misled” intoexpecting one when the story is really something else. (p. 79, fromthe 2001 edition).
In the Event story, something is wrong with the natural order of yourcreated world, and (most commonly), the story is about setting thingsback the way they're supposed to be. Or creating the world that should be. Or, most rarely, watching the world descend into chaos.
Regardless of which MICE story you write, “The most important thingis that you must end the story that you begin.” Don't promise aMilieu story and then get into chapters of detail about how your MC grew up.
So ifyou get seriously bogged down, and the editing process isn't going tofix it, maybe you need to rethink the kind of story you're telling,and you need to go back to the beginning to fix it. (Save yourdrafts, all of them!)
Now, if you’re still bent on writing a character-driven story, or you still need to flesh out characters in another story format, make sure you check out our tags section; perhaps there are resources there that can help.
If not, then please submit another ask with a specific example, and maybe we can help you debug.
