Writers are frequently pointed at psychological frameworks as a source of character. Maslow's hierarchy is the usual one: survival at the base, then safety, belonging, esteem, and self-actualisation at the top. It is a useful heuristic with well-documented limitations — the strict ordering does not hold up empirically the way the diagram implies, and the model carries cultural assumptions that do not travel everywhere.
Treat it, and everything like it, as notebook material. A framework can help you work out who somebody is. It cannot put them on the page, and a reader will never encounter the framework. What they encounter is a surface: things said, things noticed, things done with a body, things owned. The whole craft of characterisation is the conversion of an interior you understand into a surface a stranger can read.
That conversion is what this is about.
Dialogue, and the fact that people do not say what they want
The most reliable single instrument is speech, and the most reliable thing about speech is that it is oblique.
People answer the question they wish they had been asked. They change the subject at the exact moment the subject becomes dangerous. They agree in a way that means no. Most real conversation is two people managing an unstated situation while talking about something else, and dialogue that ignores this reads as characters reading each other their motivations.
The practical version: when a character wants something in a scene, they should almost never ask for it directly. What goes on the page is the manoeuvre. A mother who wants her son to come home for a festival can say a great deal about the weather, the neighbour's children, and how the house is too big, and every reader will understand exactly what is being negotiated.
Austen's Mr Collins is a whole person delivered almost entirely through speech. His proposal to Elizabeth is a long, ordered, numbered account of his own reasons for marrying, in which the woman he is addressing barely appears — and nothing else needs to be said about him, before or afterwards, because the syntax has already done it. The self-regard is structural, not stated.
Two practical notes. "Said" is close to invisible and should be your default; a hunt for synonyms produces characters who expostulate and ejaculate. And an adverb attached to a line of dialogue is usually a confession that the line is not carrying its own weight — if you have to write "she said angrily", the sentence before it has failed.
On making voices distinct: the amateur method is phonetic spelling of accents, which ages badly, is hard to read, and frequently reads as condescension towards the speaker. The professional method is syntax. Sentence length, whether someone finishes their clauses, whether they hedge, what register they reach for under pressure, which subjects they will not touch. Holden Caulfield is not distinguishable by vocabulary alone; he is distinguishable by a rhythm of assertion followed immediately by retraction.
A blunt test for a finished scene: delete every dialogue tag and give it to someone else. If they cannot tell who is speaking, the voices are the same voice.
What they notice
This is the most underused instrument in the box, and it is nearly free in any narration that sits close to a character.
Description in fiction is never neutral. Somebody is doing the looking, and what they pick out of a room characterises them more efficiently than any account of their personality. A surgeon, a landlord and a child walk into the same kitchen and three completely different kitchens appear on the page. One notices the burn scar on a forearm, one notices the damp patch above the window, one notices that the biscuits are on the high shelf again.
Virginia Woolf builds most of Mrs Dalloway out of this: the city is continuously filtered, and each filtering tells you who is doing it. But it does not require a modernist apparatus. It requires the writer to ask, before any descriptive passage, whose eyes this is coming through and what that person cares about.
The corollary is that a scene full of generic description — the weather, the furniture, the light — is usually a scene where the viewpoint has gone slack.
The body, used sparingly
Physical behaviour works when it is specific and when it is rationed.
One well-chosen gesture, observed once, will outlast three paragraphs of description: a man who checks that his wallet is in his pocket every time he passes a stranger; a woman who tidies other people's things while talking to them. These carry inference. The reader builds a history out of them without being given one.
The failure mode is the assigned tic. Once a character has pushed her hair behind her ear four times, it has stopped meaning anything and started reading as a stage direction the writer has run out of alternatives to. The same applies to the catalogue of physiological reactions — hearts pounding, stomachs dropping, breath catching — which are so standardised that they now register as a genre signal rather than as feeling.
Physical description of faces is worth less than most writers assume. Readers construct a face loosely and will not hold onto a list of features. One distinguishing detail plus how the person occupies space is usually more durable than a full inventory, and it avoids the mirror scene, which is the oldest bad solution to the first-person description problem.
Objects
What a person keeps, what they spend money on, what they have not thrown away. The most efficient characterisation I know is an object with a history attached in half a sentence.
This also gives you a way to show change without announcing it. A character who has replaced something, or finally got rid of something, has moved, and the reader registers it without being told that they have grown.
The contradiction has to appear in behaviour
A character file that lists "generous but controlling" has achieved nothing. The reader needs a scene in which the generosity is the control — the gift that cannot be refused, the help that creates an obligation — because on the page a contradiction only exists when a single action can be read two ways.
This is also the answer to the flat minor character. Supporting figures do not need biographies. They need one fact that is specific enough to imply a life, and they need to want something in the scene they appear in, even if it is only to get back to work.
A word about showing and telling
The instruction to show rather than tell is the most repeated advice in fiction and it is a preference, not a law. A great deal of excellent fiction tells constantly. Summary compresses years into a paragraph; a narrator's direct judgement can be the most alive thing on a page; an entire nineteenth-century tradition tells you what people are like and then demonstrates it.
The real principle underneath is narrower: do not assert an emotional effect you have not earned. Writing "she was devastated" costs the reader nothing and therefore moves them not at all. But writing "for the next two years she did not play" is telling, and it works.
Use scene where the moment matters and the reader should be present for it. Use summary to get across the ground in between. A draft that refuses ever to tell becomes exhausting, because everything is rendered at equal weight and the reader loses any sense of what to care about.
The thing to check when a character is not working
Usually one of three things is wrong. They want nothing in this particular scene, so they are reacting rather than acting. Or their dialogue is doing information delivery on the plot's behalf rather than pursuing anything. Or the narration has drifted away from their specific way of seeing and become a neutral camera.
None of those is fixed by going back to the notebook and adding more backstory. They are fixed on the page, in the scene, by asking what this person wants in the next four minutes and letting them fail to ask for it directly.
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Taresh Sharan
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