20 Ways How to Write Characters Better: Protagonists, Antagonists, Minor Characters, and More!

Here is the post you’ve been looking for: A complete guide of ways how to write characters better, whether you’re looking to create protagonists, antagonists, or minor characters from a range of award-winning and bestselling authors.

Here is the post you've been looking for: A complete guide of ways how to write characters better, whether you're looking to create protagonists, antagonists, or minor characters from a range of award-winning and bestselling authors.

Pop quiz: What's more important—characters or story?

I admit that this is a trick question because the answer is both. Great stories need characters, and great characters drive stories. What is The Shining without Jack Torrance? Or Murder on the Orient without Hercule Poirot? How about the Harry Potter books without Harry, Ron, and Hermione?

Sure, you can throw a few plot points together and have a story. But for readers to care (truly care) about the story, they have to care about the characters. They have to want the protagonists to succeed, want the antagonists to fail, or feel conflicted about why things have to happen the way they do.

This type of emotion is only drawn from compelling characters, and I've gathered together 20 incredible posts from WritersDigest.com to help everyone write characters readers will love or love to hate. I've broken these posts into three sections: Character Description, Types of Characters, and Diving Deeper Into Character Development.

Character Description

One way for readers to connect with characters is through character description. But there's more than one way for writers to describe their characters.

Types of Characters

Once you know how to describe characters, learn the differences between protagonists, antagonists, monsters, unreliable narrators, antiheroes, and minor characters.

Diving Deeper Into Character Development

So now that you know all about description and character types, use these posts to dive even deeper into your character development.

When you take this online writing course, you will learn how to create believable fiction characters and construct scenes with emotional depth and range. Create characters readers will love and develop a strong point of view for your fiction book today!

Robert Lee Brewer is Senior Editor of Writer's Digest, which includes managing the content on WritersDigest.com and programming virtual conferences. He's the author of 40 Plot Twist Prompts for Writers: Writing Ideas for Bending Stories in New Directions, The Complete Guide of Poetic Forms: 100+ Poetic Form Definitions and Examples for Poets, Poem-a-Day: 365 Poetry Writing Prompts for a Year of Poeming, and more. Also, he's the editor of Writer's Market, Poet's Market, and Guide to Literary Agents. Follow him on Twitter @robertleebrewer.