How to Create Charismatic Characters — Part 1: Assigning Physical Attributes

Despite having written three books on the craft of writing (The Novel Writer’s Blueprint: Five Simple Steps to Creating and Completing Your First Book, Smash Fear and Write like a Pro, and Novel Advice: Motivation, Inspiration, and Creative Writing Tips for Aspiring Authors), I haven’t yet addressed the topic of creating characters.

It’s time to remedy that gap via a multi-part blog series, of which this article is the first part.

Now when it comes to creating characters, I often return to an idea Matt Groening, cartoonist and creator of The Simpsons, has referred to often in interviews.

When designing the iconic Simpsons family, Groening notes that he applied a design technique he learned from Walt Disney: make the characters identifiable in silhouette.

In an episode of Bob Dylan’s Theme Time Radio Hour, Groening put it like this:

“The secret of designing cartoon characters is you make a character that you can tell who it is in silhouette. I learned this from watching Mickey Mouse as a kid. You can tell Mickey Mouse from a mile away, those two big ears. Same thing with Popeye. Same thing with Batman. And so, if you look at the Simpsons, they’re all identifiable in silhouette. Bart with the picket fence hair, Marge with the beehive, Homer with the two little hairs, and all the rest.”

Groening consciously created protagonists whose physical shapes are uniquely identifiable and work to differentiate them from the supporting characters around them. Groening’s brilliant design choice likely played at least some part in the enduring and iconic nature of the Simpsons who have survived two decades of television.

For a further explanation for the popularity and iconic nature of Groening’s creation, we can look to author and cartoonist Scott McCloud.

In his book, Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art, McCloud identifies a spectrum of realistic to abstract artistic representation. McCloud suggests the simplest of faces is shorthand for the everyman or the reader themselves, whereas the more realistic a face is illustrated, the more precise it becomes and thus more foreign and distanced from reader identification.

The popularity then, of The Simpson or Batman or Mickey Mouse, may be the result of the readily identifiable nature of their simplistic but unique shape or silhouette, which differentiates them from the other characters around them while simultaneously making them relatable to the reader.

For the opposite of this effect, see the “valley of the uncanny” theory, which suggests that when characters look and move almost, but not exactly, like natural beings, it causes a response of revulsion among some observers.
This suggests an equation:

Simple + Unique = Memorable and Likeable

A cartoonist designing a new character, then, might do well to try to create one with a unique silhouette, but created easily identifiable shapes.

Unfortunately, as fiction authors, we don’t have the luxury of making our characters visually distinct in the same way cartoonists do.

Our job as creators of characters, however, remains much the same as that of the cartoonist designer. We still need to make our characters stand out from the rest of the cast in our novel and from other the fictional characters in general.

We want our literary characters to be unique and identifiable, just like Mickey Mouse and the Simpsons family.

Assigning characters distinct physical attributes is, of course, one way of distinguishing our protagonist from others. Certainly, we want our characters to have a physique that is memorable to the audience, appropriate to the story, and suggestive of character in some way.

In a long-form novel, however, readers often forget the initial description of a character’s appearance. If you mention your character has green eyes in Chapter 1, it’s highly unlikely the reader is going to still remember that random detail come Chapter 47. As such, if you do want to define a character via physical traits, you’re going to need to reference them often, so the reader doesn’t forget.

In Chuck Palahniuk’s novels Damned and Doomed, for example, he often refers to his protagonist Maddy Spencer’s chubby body, school girl uniform, and horn-rimmed glasses – an appearance she is stuck with for all eternity given she’s a ghost.

In addition to simply reminding the reader often of the character’s physique, another approach to establishing physical appearance is to turn it into an essential part of the plot. Harry Potter’s lightning bolt scar on his forehead, for example, isn’t just a physical differentiator, but also an ongoing source of pain and a corporeal manifestation of his psychic connection to the antagonist Lord Voldemort.

All that said, we must acknowledge that while a character’s physical appearance can be important, in literature what really defines characters are the actions they take and the decisions they make when faced with challenges and crisis during the story.

We’ll discuss that topic more in part 2 of this blog series.