As much as I would like to tell you that this is your novel and you can do anything you want with it, Im sorry, if you are looking to be published, you are really writing for an audience.

To create characters for your fantasy novel you must consider your market and create characters that your readers are able to relate to, and care for. This does not mean that you reveal all there is about your characters in the first few lines, your characters a best revealed a little as the plot unfolds, a little intrigue goes a long way. But your characters should be developed before you put your pen to paper.

The most common mistake aspiring fantasy writers make is to ignore character development, or even more common, fall back on some tired old stereotypes. There is no excuse for this Im afraid. You have all the tools available to you as any writer of any other genre, and then some more you get to make up. It is very important that your characters are complete, and have substance, personality and individual traits, strengths, weaknesses and even fatal flaws.

Stereotyped characters are so predictable, predictable is boring remember your market. Fantasy readers, if they wanted boring they would pick up a biography, or a mathematics text book.

Know that the reader of a fantasy novel is an audience looking for wonderment; they thrive on something new, unusual and different. If your characters are predicable or the character from someone elses novel with a different name, your novel is not going anywhere Im afraid. No amount of action or adventure can make up for characters that are long forgotten, or whose names just didnt matter.

Certainly your novels plots and events may require your characters to have fatal flaws. These flaws are often the elements of your characters that your reader will most easily relate to. Please dont make them perfect. Nobody likes a perfect smarty pants. If your hero is perfect you might be thinking that your reader would enjoy him because they would like to be him, but you give your reader very little chance of relating to him.

Your fantasy novel characters may be human, or beast, they may be magicians or gods, but they should have a history, a past, relationships, or at least a longing for relationship. By this I dont mean that your characters must be looking for love, but a relationship with their environment, their peers, and other characters they will interact with in your story. This relationship may not be comfortable and easy, in fact if your character is fully developed, complete with a personality some of his/hers/its relationships will be strained or even outright volatile. This does not have to be written in as part of your story but certainly even among friends undercurrents and tensions may be hinted at.

To create my characters I make a little diary for them. I dont write this diary into the novel, but this is certainly a great idea to keep your characters IN character as the story unfolds.

My diary begins long before the novel does, it will included little notes about the characters childhood (if they had one) and a whole lot of history. Even when the story is being written the diary continues. In this I include little bits and pieces about the way they feel about the events they encounter and often things that were thought and felt that will not make it to the story being told.

If your characters are not human, which is often the case in a fantasy novel, you will have to learn the art of mianthro perspection, writing from the consciousness of inhuman objects or beasts, or in the least giving them human viewpoints without making them human.

There are many things to consider here, certainly your beasts food source, but also the length of time your beast lives for, and its basic generic make up. Simply describing what your dragon looks like and giving it a completely human mind set does not give you a dragon, but a fairly odd shaped human.

Never dismiss the value of your secondary characters. Secondary characters are excellent tools to bring your character to life in the events of your story. You secondary characters will often play a role in your novels central plot, but these are also idea from which to base your understory from.

Your secondary characters are not extensions of your novels hero and will each have their own little quirks. Which means you will also have to give them the same attention to development as your main character, still you will not write everything you know about them into the novel, but they must have some substance to be of service to you and your novels plot.

Now lets look at your villain. It is most important here to avoid the stereotypes of fantasy novels. Do not invest so much energy defining your world and giving birth to your hero and forget that your villain is as much central to your fantasy novels plan also.

Is the line between right and wrong really so obvious. Is good and evil just black and white? I hope not, there would seem to be little point in fantasy if it could not be rich in color. Put the cookie cutter away, you never know whos cheering for the bad guy.

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About The Author
Publishing pro and author/filmmaker Barry Sheppard has written and published many books, with hundreds of reviews in newspapers, TV and radio. He is now concentrating, with his team, on writing articles for others.

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