How to Write a Character Analysis as a Creative Writer

Learning how successful authors create their characters can uncover a treasure trove of insights and techniques you can use to build your own. Writing a character analysis gives you a helpful framework for doing that.

Here, we look at how to write a character analysis as a creative writer, including some quick examples to help you get a feel for the type of things you might want to touch on.

What Is a Character Analysis?

A character analysis is a detailed overview of what you know about a fictional character and how you know it. It covers everything from their role in the story to their unique quirks.

Doing a character analysis is a way of putting another author’s techniques and choices under the microscope. It helps you to understand how they achieve the effect they did. You can then use those insights to hone your character writing skills.

How to Do a Character Analysis as a Creative Writer

Obviously, the first step is to pick one. Protagonists and antagonists are always solid choices, as they usually get a lot of development. However, analyzing supporting characters can be as worthwhile. Just make sure you opt for someone with enough depth to be interesting.

Next, read or reread the book (or books, if it’s a series) closely, and take plenty of notes as you go. Once you’re done, you can organize your insights into a structured analysis that will be easier to reflect on and refer back to.

Even if you’re thinking about analyzing a beloved character who feels like a friend, it’s best not to do it from memory. Rereading will give you the chance to look at the writing. You want to understand what the writer did that enabled you to connect with the character.

A big part of that is characterization. But what is characterization, exactly?

It’s how the writer portrays the character on the page: everything they reveal, directly and indirectly, to enable us to build a vivid picture of the character as a fully realized person.

Characterization is vital because it’s what enables writers to get the idea of the character that exists in their head out onto the page and then into our minds as readers. A writer might know plenty about their characters but without effective characterization, readers won’t.

As for how to analyze characterization, pay attention to the whole range of ways a writer can reveal things about a character:

• Direct characterization—what the author outright tells readers about the character, what they’re like, how they look, what they feel, and such.

• Actions and reactions—what the character does and how they do it adds to a reader’s understanding of them.

• Their voice—what readers learn about them through what they say and how they say it. That could be directly through dialogue or through the thoughts the author reports.

• Other means—the author can use other indirect ways to give insights into the character, like the way they dress or how they decorate their personal space.

It’s a good idea to include specific examples of these techniques in your analysis, as it makes them a lot more concrete and easier to replicate for yourself. Include direct quotes where you can.

If you’re wondering whether you can write a character analysis of your own character to see how they’re shaping up and/or organize your thoughts, you absolutely can. It’s a great way to think about them in detail.

However, you might be too close to the story for it to be fully effective. Because of your existing knowledge, what you think is there on the page might not be as clear to a reader.

To help you get around that, we created tools like Manuscript Analysis and Virtual Beta Reader that enable you to supplement your self-evaluation with rapid, objective feedback on how your characters might come across to someone else.

What to Include in a Character Analysis

To help organize your thoughts, here are some areas to look at while you’re reading. You can use them as section headings to structure your analysis too.

Their Role

You want to ask the big questions about why the writer included this character and the impact they have on the story.

You can start thinking of this at a basic level by asking yourself whether they fill one of the traditional roles or archetypes, such as:

• Protagonist—the main character. They might also be a hero, a specific kind of protagonist.

• Antagonist—the person who opposes the protagonist. They can be a straight up “villain,” but they don’t have to be.

• A foil—A character who is there to provide a contrast with the protagonist so that readers can pick up on certain qualities.

These terms can give you a way into thinking about the character’s impact on the story, but you’ll want to probe deeper than a simple label. What impact do they have on how things unfold? Do they enable an author to explore a theme of some kind?

For our first character analysis example, let’s look at Gollum in the Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien.

He’s a secondary antagonist. However, that label doesn’t really do justice to the influence he has on the plot and what he represents.

For an effective analysis, you’d need to go more in-depth. For instance, you could reflect on how he provides a tragic example of the corrupting power of the ring.

Their Character Arc

Think about the emotional journey they go on. Do they grow and change throughout the story? If so, how? If they do, they’re known as a “dynamic character.”

How did they evolve, and what prompted it? What was their driving force throughout the book and did that change? What did they want and what did they need?

To use one of the most famous character arcs as an example, Ebenezer Scrooge in A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens initially wants to be left to his selfish ways. By the end, after a harsh wake-up call, he embraces a happier, more generous life.

Of course, there are also arcs that aren’t nearly so positive. Watching someone turn bad or hit self-destruct is pretty satisfying too, so long as we as readers can understand why they’re doing it. Just look at the titular character from William Shakespeare’s Macbeth.

Sometimes, a character may not actually change much if at all (making them a “static character” or someone with “a flat arc”). This isn’t necessarily a bad thing—static characters can make useful side characters.

They can also make suitable protagonists for certain kinds of plot-focused stories: episodic stories, detective stories, and satires are a few examples. The most well-known detective of all, Sherlock Holmes, is a character who remains mostly unchanged but is still compelling.

If the character is entirely or mostly static, think about why the author went that route. What did they achieve by having that character stay consistent? Was it more realistic? Did it provide a point of stability? Or did it enable them to focus on other characters or the plot?

Relationships With Other Characters

As well as considering the impact the character has on the plot, think about the connections they have with other characters.

Who do they influence? Who are they influenced by? Are there certain qualities or facts about them we only learn through their interactions with other characters?

As an example, in Frankenstein by Mary Shelley, the monster secretly watches the DeLacey family and learns a lot about people and how they interact, while we as readers learn he can be sympathetic and generous.

Their Personality

List some personality traits you know your chosen character has. Try to build a comprehensive picture of what they’re like.

Then ask yourself how you know that. What did the writer do to get that across? Are there specific events, decisions they made, or bits of dialogue that you can point to that gave you that impression?

If you were looking at Elizabeth Bennet from Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen, you might put down independent. You could then use her deciding to walk all the way to Netherfield Park to visit her ill sister as an example.

For her love interest, Mr. Darcy, you might put down that he’s inflexible and include his famous quote: “My good opinion, once lost, is lost forever.”

If aspects of their personality change over the course of the books or series, can you pinpoint moments where that started to happen? How about where it became really obvious?

Look back at the work you did into the impact they have on the story and their character arc. How does their personality play into that?

Their Background

So much of what makes characters who they are (at least at the start of the book) happens off the page.

How did the author reveal elements of the character’s backstory? Do we know what their childhood was like? How about the key events in their life? How did those shape their behavior or beliefs in the book itself?

What about the culture they come from? Does that impact how they think or act?

While you’re thinking about this, it might be worth looking at it from a technical angle as well as a character-led one, as integrating backstory can be tricky. Did the author avoid info dumping (giving too much additional detail all in one go) and if they did, how?

Other Details

Finally, there are all the other details that help to bring a character to life, things like what they look like, their likes and dislikes, and their interests.

Did they aid your understanding of the character? Did they influence the plot somehow?

How did the author reveal them? Did it feel natural, or did you ever wonder why the author thought you needed to know something?

How to Use Character Analyses as a Writer

Once you’ve got a character analysis, make sure you don’t just set it aside, never to see the light of day again.

Look through it and pick out some techniques you’d like to use or use more of in your own writing. You could think about how you could use them to flesh out your existing characters or revisit the list before you begin a new writing project.

You probably don’t want it to be a one-off either. While doing one character analysis will give you plenty to think about, it’s sensible to do several so that you can examine various types of characters and writers.

If there’s an aspect of character work you want to get stronger at (like character arcs), you could reread the analyses you’ve done through that lens or even do some fresh ones where you zero in on that element. That way, you can compare and contrast different approaches.

The idea isn’t just to pick up tips and tricks as you analyze, but to create a resource bank of character inspiration that you can dip back into whenever you need to.

Conclusion: How to Write a Character Analysis

Performing a character analysis lets you delve deep into the inner workings of writing great characters. It helps uncover the choices, skills, and techniques a writer used to bring a character to life, from their overall arc to their dialogue.

To approach a character analysis as a writer, carefully read through the book or series, paying attention to the role the character plays in the overall story and how the writer builds them on the page. You can then pick out techniques to experiment with in your own writing.

ProWritingAid can help you sharpen skills that contribute to effective characterization, like focusing on showing rather than telling and writing powerful dialogue. Sign up for a free account to discover how.