Character Creation: My 3 Step Exercise of Immovables, Sliders, and Extension

    

    Without a doubt, characters are important for your story — they are the pieces that move your plot and interact with your world; and, no matter your genre, they are what will convince your readers both of the realism of your novel and to continue reading.

        So, of course, they're important to get right. 

    I remember that I would often set myself down to create a character (especially for longer works) and find myself wracked with indecision; while I might have an idea of the role I want the character to play, I would always struggle with pinpointing anything else about them. Or, on the flip side, I would sometimes be tempted to let my mind wander for the entire morning and to write wandering, wordy descriptions of my favorite aspects of a character. It's two sides of the character creation coin, and I could never seem to find a happy medium.

    That is until I began to use my exercise of "Immovables, Sliders, and Extension." The aim of this is to simplify character development into answering a few easy questions and then thinking about our answers to these questions. Plus, it has the added bonus of helping you flesh out the in-betweens of your work's world.

What makes this process work?

    This 3 step process solves the wordy v.s simple dilemma described above, but I also find this process useful because it specifically fosters the development of realistic characters. As humans, we exist beyond just simple facts and personality traits; rather, it's more like we exist around traits that bend and react to our surroundings — and this exercise uses this idea to help us writers create realistic characters.

    The exercise simplifies to describing what I call a character's "immovables,” a character's "sliders, and then elaborating on the effects of these. By identifying the values a character is most close to and will likely never change along with the more moveable values, we create characters that can interact and change with others and the world around them — just as people in real life do.

    Admittedly, I usually mostly use this process to create my side characters, but such steps can be tailored towards fleshing out your main characters as well. But what does all this mean exactly?

PART 1: An Immovable:

    As its name implies, I simplify this section to the facts about the characters that are mostly constant or snippets of a character I know I want to have. A few examples are the following:

• Their current relation to the main character (do they hate this character? Are they neutral to them? How do they know our new character?)
• Their thoughts on the world/society around them
• Their current position in the world.
• Their overall goal in life.
Their goal relating to the main character.

    If you already have an idea in mind, you can also put the character's physicalities (age, gender, race, sexuality). For example, let's apply this to Jon, a knight I just created for a hypothetical fantasy novel that we're all writing together. His answers might look somewhat like the following in my notes:

• They come into contact with the main character when she visits the King.
• He currently supports the monarchy.
• Knight
• Wanting to make a living.
• The knight treats the main character formally and politely, like he would any guest of the King.

    See how they're sparse? You save time when the notes are simple like this — but don't worry, we'll elaborate more on our knight in the future.

PART 2: A SLIDER:

    And now here are where things get interesting! In this section, we take the mostly two-dimensional character that we had created in the immovable section and fully flesh them out into a realistic person — and we do so by using sliders.

    We take the five (or more) questions we had answered in Part 1 and answer the question: "Can this character change their answer to this question? And if so, what will it take for them to do so?"

  
 For example, let's take the second question of a character's relation to the world around them. Say that we continued on with our Knight Jon, as we've developed in Part 1. Now, if we applied Part 2 to this, we could come up with a few scenarios about our Knight and the monarchy he lives in:

• Jon would never change his opinion on this: as such, we just created a character that is unwaveringly loyal — even if the monarchy is immoral or unjust.
• Jon would change his opinion, but only in a severe situation: now, Jon shows himself to be a man guided by his morals. When we think of a situation like this, perhaps we could think of Jon as an ally or foil for our main character.
• Jon would willingly change his opinion given the opportunity to: Expanding off of this, perhaps Jon could help lead an alliance or side with a coup.

    See how these sliders expanded on these thoughts? Now, let's move on to the purpose of these sliders, or the "Extension" step,

PART 3: EXTENSION

    Now, this last step is similar to what we had begun to do in Part 2. In other words, we take the "sliders" that we pushed in our characters and began to develop implications for each scenario we choose on both the "immovable" traits and the sliders.

Effect on the Character: 

    Often, I find myself using Part 2 to affect the way a character talks (both with other characters and their syntax) along with the actions a character would take. For example, if we chose to develop Jon as an immovable supporter of the monarchy, we could then expand on this idea by having his speech reflect absolute rhetoric. Or, we could keep his support of the system in the back of our minds whenever we write any actions he takes — like in his reactions with a main character that opposes such a monarchy.

Effect on the World:

    This is the step where character development bleeds into world development. I use this step to ask myself a couple questions: first, do others share similar beliefs/traits? What effect, if any, does this have on the world? How do others react to this character — are they an outlier or do their traits/decisions make them a norm?

    

    And so, this has been an explanation of the three-step process I use to create my characters. I hope this helps everyone develop their characters, and please let me know you’re feedback on this! Does it sound like something you’ll pick up for your next character?