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How To Get Inside Your Character’s Heads

By on November 13, 2019

To write compelling, three-dimensional characters, you need to know them. If you want to get inside your character's heads read on. Our tips will help you understand precisely the way your characters would think, act, and react, in order to make them consistent, engaging, and exciting to your readers.

So what are the ways to can hope to get inside your character's heads?
Let's take a look.

Use your own emotions

Whatever your characters are going through, you need to use your own experiences and emotions to be able to write with authenticity and better engage your readers because of it. The emotional situations you put your characters in may not be exactly like your own. Still, by thinking of similar experiences or times where you felt the emotion you are trying to convey, you'll be able to understand better how your characters are feeling.

Understand their place in the world

Your characters will have both a physical and a social place in the world, and you should strive to understand them both better. If your character lives in isolation in the woods, for example, you should set up camp for a few days doing the same. If your character experiences bullying or racism, you need to put yourself in their shoes in these instances too.

Go shopping on their behalf

Take yourself on a day out as your character, think about where they would go, how they would get there, and what they would do. Going shopping on your character's behalf can work particularly well as you can not only think about what they would buy and why but how they would interact with other people they come into contact with along the way.

Take up their hobbies

If your character has particular interests or hobbies, you need to take them up yourself to get a sincere feel for what they are like. So it's time to branch out and try new things to understand life from your character's point of view. 

Research their background

Wherever they've come from, whatever they do for a living, whatever their backstory is, research is critical. You can't have a character that's a world-class surgeon unless you can understand what life as a world-class surgeon would be like. Proper research is invaluable for this. It should be undertaken extensively and with great attention to detail as it's the detail that will make your characters seem so much more believable, and what will make your readers engage with them as your story unfolds.

Sometimes the best way to get inside your character's heads is to experience life the way they do. So the next time you are having trouble understanding your characters, give these tips a try to get to know them better and be able to write them more naturally and easily!

So now you know how how to get inside your character's heads, why not discover the best questions to ask your characters?

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bethany cadman
Bethany Cadman - bethanycadman.co.uk

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