12 Writing Exercises to help develop your character and their voice.
Editors note - There's a lot of boring writers drivel. So, to spare you from the headache if you're not interested, your characters individual voices and personalities are important for engaging stories and interesting plots. You can skip down to the end for the exercises.
Think about the people you know, the people you love. What's one thing they have in common, besides the obvious? They're all uniquely different. Everyone in the world is different in some way, even in media. Books and movies all have unique sounding characters that are different from each other. In Harry Potter, for example, All of the characters have their own voice, even the Weasley twins are different in their own ways.
Complex and unique characters that sound different, interact and speak differently, make for engaging books and dynamics.
I don't know anybody who would want to read a 50,000 word novel about two boring characters, who're exactly alike, and talk in the same monotonous tone. You can have a character who is "boring." who speaks monotonously and still have an interesting novel that people would read.
Having different characters who come together to create funny, interesting, or weird dynamics makes for a readable piece. Take your monotonous character, by themselves, they're kind of boring. They're not engaging to follow. But, introducing different characters to come and interact with your "boring" character, creates funny and memorable dynamics.
Think the anime Saiki K, or Veronica Sawyer from Heathers. If you took only those two characters, and stripped away all of the background characters, they wouldn't make for very interesting stories. Saiki would be happy, living his days in peace and quiet. Veronica would just be a normal edgy high school girl. But if you bring the side characters back, you bring the story and their conflicts back. Saiki goes back to being annoyed by his weird and goofy friends, wishing for peace and quiet. Veronica goes back to being tormented by JD and the group dynamic in the Heathers clique.
These stories utilize background characters to create conflict in their main characters' lives, and makes fun and interesting stories and dynamics with them.
Without further ado, here are 12 exercises to help you develop your characters, and get you thinking.
Ask your character what they want, and have them monologue about it.
Think about who, in your life, does your character remind you of.
Ask yourself, What does my character want, and what does my character need? How do they conflict with each other, and how does this affect my story?
A good exercise to help you write characters interacting, and practice dialogue is to do the ABCD exercise.
The ABCD exercise is writing a full page, or 500 words, of dialogue between two characters, character a and character b, talking about what they think character c thinks of character d. Then, write another page depicting how character c actually interacts with character d.
Write journal entries from the pov of your character.
Think about your character's habits, nervous tics, or tells, and write out a page where they do those things.
Think about something your character holds dear to them, and give the item a backstory.
Think about how your character interacts with other characters, and write a page for each interaction.
Think about a belief or opinion your character has, and write a page of dialogue, where your character is explaining their belief, and why they believe in it, to another character.
Write a page about your character reminiscing, or talking, about a cherished memory from their past, or childhood.
Write a page of dialogue about character a telling character c about character b, whom c has never met before, what kind of things do they say? What do they think of b? Then write another page from character c’s point of view, what are they thinking? How do their thoughts of b change? What do they think of character a? How do they imagine character a and b’s relationship?
Write a page about a character being forced into a situation with their greatest fear. Then, if you want to go a step further, write a page of the same thing, but introduce another character that the first holds dear to them, or wants to protect.
