That’s a great question, and I don’t really know if I have done so on purpose.

I’ve written plenty characters that were just boring and flat. They were like cardboard cutouts, in that they looked like characters but they had no depth. And when I first started writing years ago, I just couldn’t figure out why my story wasn’t moving forward. I thought the plot was wrong, or even that my ideas for the story weren’t worth writing down.

In 2019, I attended a fiction workshop with other writers, and I realized that the characters I was writing were a big part of my problem. A YA fantasy writer named Kirk interrogated my characters and wanted to know about who they really were.

After just a few questions, I realized what he was trying to teach me: if I wanted to write realistic characters, then they had to be real. If they weren’t real to me, then they wouldn’t be real to the reader either.

Honestly, that workshop was more way than worth the few hundred dollars that it cost. It taught me something so simple that it’s almost stupid–Without characters you don’t have a story, and without real characters you won’t have readers.

There are many ways flesh out characters, like the sheets someone else mentioned earlier in this thread. And the great part is that they can be whoever you want them to be. I just focus on the “grit” because that helps keep me grounded. Otherwise, my characters would likely all be superheroes with no flaws and perfect lives, and that just sounds abysmal!