An Exercise in Character Development

What makes an interesting character?

What gives this interesting character a voice?

I don’t only mean this in a literal aural sense but also a physical presence that can be felt on multiple levels—a voice.

How does a character lift herself off the pages and develop this unique voice, a particular hairstyle or even a sense of fashion or a particular gait or physical mannerisms that we might observe in someone sitting across from us? I am assuming this happens in many layers, through small stories, possibly.

These layers are built upon each other with as each passing anecdote is lightly brushed on by the writer, smothering each layer upon the other, until a unique moment arrives—a literary spark of sorts—and the reader and even the writer gets an eerie sense of a living, breathing character who is every bit real and relatable as a friend you might meet at a dinner party. It is at this very moment that the newly minted character drives the character development process as opposed to the writer developing the character.

Let’s start.