Finishing out these posts on character needs, extracted from Character Fiction 101: How to Write Fictional Characters and Character Stories. Today, a basic need that provides motivation for many powerful stories, the need for autonomy.

Each of us needs to feel in control over his own life and his own choices, a measure of independence and freedom, a corner of the world that is “mine, all mine, to do with as I wish.”

Another post on character needs, extracted from Character Fiction 101: How to Write Fictional Characters and Character Stories. Today, a need that has been on my heart of late, the need for community.

Feeling part of a wider community, beyond one’s immediate family, involves shared perceptions and identity with others and connections to them, a feeling of belonging, that we matter to one another, that we’re all watching each others’ backs, a belief that our needs will be met through the community that we share. We are not just a collection of individuals all competing to win; we are also all parts of larger communities.

The next post on character needs, extracted from Character Fiction 101: How to Write Fictional Characters and Character Stories. Today, the need for intimacy.

We all need emotional and physical closeness to at least one other person. This is the person who sees us as we really are, naked and undignified, and whom we see the same way, and love anyway. The need for intimacy, both physical intimacy and emotional intimacy, generates some of the oldest and most powerful story conflicts, and most romance novels.

The next post in my series of character needs from Character Fiction 101, the most basic of all: physical needs.

Physical needs include air, water, food, and sleep, and the other things our biologies need to survive. (The other 10 categories deal with emotional needs.)

A character meets her physical needs by breathing, eating and drinking, exercising, sleeping, and even evacuating (although I’d be careful about working that into a story).

Another post on character needs, extracted from Character Fiction 101: How to Write Fictional Characters and Character Stories.

Today, the need for security, which played a significant role in the life of the character “Eddie” in From the Ashes of Courage.

Security includes our need for shelter, cleanliness, protection, and safety, and the like.

From the time we were newborns, we instinctively knew how to establish rapport with our mothers, whom nature had already primed to fulfill our need for security. From the moment they’re born, babies how to recognize human faces and to imitate them. And they instinctively know how to cry. No one needs to teach them how. They immediately use these innate communication skills to establish a relationship with their primary caregivers, which will provide them everything they need to survive, until they are able to provide for themselves.

Says children’s-book author Elise Broach in a recent blog post about likable characters, “Nothing in a story keeps readers as enthralled as a character who has won their hearts.”

You’ll get no argument from me on that count!

Elise talks about putting your character in a jam to inspire sympathy. Always a good idea, because we tend to feel sorry for people who get a bad rap that they don’t deserve. “A difficult situation with a high emotional investment for the character sows the seeds of compassion and affection in the reader.”

She goes on to talk about “personality traits” that endear characters, or that put readers off: “spunk; persistence; courage; kindness; ingenuity; loyalty… funny” versus “boring or predictable… overly earnest or preachy or self-pitying… Whiny… Passive… mean to animals” and so forth. Definitely a thought-provoking post.

And here are a few of my thoughts.

I’m posting a series on character needs, extracted from Character Fiction 101: How to Write Fictional Characters and Character Stories.

I’m starting with the need for attention, which inspired my story, “The Friendship Dress,” posted at Danielle La Paglia’s blog.

We all need both to give and to receive attention. We all want to feel special at least some of the time, want to be the center of attention, even those of us who are quiet and introverted. Our need for attention is the root of the adage that you get what you focus on, and is surely part of the magic behind positive thinking and the law of attraction.

I’m working on an ebook, entitled Character Fiction 101: How to Write Fictional Characters and Character Stories. I plan to give the ebook away for free, for a number of reasons that I lay out in the book’s introduction— Mostly because I long to see more online authors turn out high-quality character stories. Many of the stories I read hit-and-miss at best. I’m hoping that authors will explore the ideas I’m overviewing in this book and that they’ll integrate them more fully into their stories.

Yeah, maybe that’s a little egotistical. But these are the principles and characteristics that I personally value in a character story. They define what I consider “good” fiction. Naturally, I’d be overjoyed if more authors only wrote like me. (Eh. What’y’a gonna do?)

BTW, I also plan to release the book in print, probably at a nominal price-point, because the book is only an overview (probably about 100 pages) of an exceedingly deep subject area, as deep as the human psyche.

Much of the content of this book comes originally from this blog and from research I’ve collected during my years as a character author. Of course, I still need to revise what’s already written and flesh out what isn’t yet. I’m hoping to have that done sometime next week, working at breakneck speed. (But please don’t hold your breath, because there are a dozen things that could go wrong.)

UPDATE: Early April, and I’ve discovered it’s going to be weeks before I finish, because I’m extending the content, in some cases by an order of magnitude. But in the meantime, I’m posting extracts from the new content on this blog.

For now, I have managed to put together an outline for the book, which I’m including below in the form of an extended Table of Contents.

Keep writing! -TimK

When I first started writing stories, I read numerous online articles and guides about developing characters. You’ve probably seen them yourself. Even many established authors have posted similar character profile worksheets. Most of them focus on surface characteristics, quirks, or hooks, like her hair- and eye-color, her smoking habit, the way she eats her hair while she’s talking on the phone, or the lisp with which she pronounces her R’s. But these are all just, at best, surface manifestations of what really makes a character feel like a real person— or fails to make her real.

These quirks are just what we see on the surface. But character is what happens under the surface. The Oxford Pocket Dictionary of Current English defines character as “the mental and moral qualities distinctive to an individual” (emphasis added). Character is not the physical manifestations we observe on the surface, but the psychological ones we don’t necessarily observe. Or as Holly Lisle put it, character is “who you are when no one is looking, and who you are when someone is looking, and how those two people are different, and why.” Character is what you discover when you dig deep down into a person’s personality.