It isn’t possible to write good fiction without having well defined characters.  Yes these characters are fictitious but they still have to be well defined otherwise, with flat characters, your novel becomes lifeless.

Well rounded characters are all important to the plot of your novel as they will make it so much easier for you to write your narrative and have the words flow well.  Often, if you are struggling for words, and nothing seems to make sense it is usually because you are unable to quite identify how your people would act in this situation.

None of us have “writers block” in the real world.  Things keep flowing regardless of whether you know what to say or not.  It’s your novel so you can make up anything you like.  If you don’t know what your character would say, have them not say anything.  It’s what could happen in real life so there is no reason for it to not happen for your fictional people.

So how do you create these well defined characters?  You take a large piece of paper, open your favorite word processing program and start with a sex and a name and then work on the analysis of characters.  You will have male and female characters.  Your narrative forms may need action heroes, heroines, villains and background personas, there may be a need for a dark horse.  Take your time developing these characters, you need to think about their physical features.  How they wear their hair, what color are their eyes, what style are their clothes, where do they live, are they married, divorced, have children, are children, educated, come from a good background or poverty?

You need to answer all of these questions as fully as you can and then fill out more detail.  Where do they work, in what capacity.  What is their family background?  There is a lot to do here but it is well worth it.  The thing is though that you need to have the greatest detail for your chief characters and significantly less for the others.  Once you have created them it helps to find a photograph of someone who looks like your character as you have created them, search www.flikr.com or you can do a search through the images section of Google, MSN or Bing.  When you find the right face, print it out and write the name of your fictional character on it.  Keep it handy when you write and you’ll find your novel flows so much more easily.

There is a huge change when you do this.  You are no longer writing about strangers but friends, people you know better than your neighbor, in some cases better than you own family.  Your work of fiction has just become more real to you than real life.  All you have to do now is record what happens.