Character Beliefs: How to Develop Realistic Characters

Create characters that resonate with your readers and delve into the psychology behind crafting believable and engaging characters with the help of writer Iris Marsh.

Iris is a behavioral researcher turned writer. In her work, she focuses on her character’s journeys as well as the plot. She lives in the Netherlands with her partner and cat.

In this day and age, we hear a lot about mindset, the “power of our mind,” and manifestation. All these things amount to the same things: our belief system.

This is a psychological concept that refers to how we see the world around us. It’s a collection of our experiences and the lessons we’ve learned from the people in our lives.

For instance: 

• Money is the root of all evil
• You need to graduate from university to succeed in life
• I’m not worthy of love

They’re a huge part of who we are as people and how we act in certain situations.

Which means they’re also a huge part of who your characters are.

Beliefs influence what they feel and think and how they act.

So, in this article, we’ll explore our belief system in a bit more depth. After that, we’ll see how you can use this to create realistic characters and create characters that complement your plot.

The Power of Our Belief System

Our beliefs are massively influenced by our culture, society, and the people we surround ourselves with.

These beliefs live in our subconscious—we generally don’t know we have them. Our brain created these beliefs as a shortcut.

Here’s How it Works:

First, either something in your genetics, something you learned from others or society, or something you experienced happened. Let’s say your significant other cheated on you and you broke up.

Your mind will form a belief based on that experience and other experiences like that one. If you’ve been dumped before, have been cheated on before, or have experienced other instances where you felt inadequate or unloved, your belief will be something like: I’m not worthy of love/I’m unlovable.

This belief comes with a strategy.

In our example, a strategy could be: “I have to pretend I’m better than I am,” or “I have to avoid serious relationships.”

An avoidant strategy is quite common.

So, when there’s then a critical event, for instance, your new partner says “I love you,” your strategy will kick in and your dysfunctional belief activates.

While we’re not aware of our beliefs, we are aware of our thoughts.

In this example, the dysfunctional belief may lead to thoughts like:

• They may say that now, but eventually, he’ll just leave me or cheat on me
• We were just having fun, I don’t want this to become more serious
• He doesn’t really love me, just the person I’ve been pretending to be

These thoughts work together with feelings, bodily reactions, and behavior.

So, you might feel anxious in this case, feeling like there’s a weight on your chest, and your behavior is to tell them you don’t love them and want to end things.

How to Use Beliefs to Create Realistic Characters

As we’re all influenced by our beliefs, your characters are too. You can use this to create more realistic characters.

There are several ways you can use this.

If you have an idea about the type of character you want to write, think about their personality traits.

For instance, you may want to write a character who’s impulsive and empathetic. What beliefs could fit with those traits?

For impulsiveness, these could be:

• Inaction is always worse than action
• If you wait too long, the opportunity will be gone
• Your first idea is always the best idea

These beliefs could lead to your character acting impulsively in certain situations.

Then you can brainstorm further: what type of strategy fits with this?

In this case, the strategy would be something like: “Do the first thing that comes to mind.”

Of course, this belief came from somewhere. Was it an experience or set of experiences? Something that was told to them by important people in their life? Is it something society imparted to them? Is it genetic? A combination of these things?

That’s (part of) your backstory right there.

Then consider the types of thoughts, feelings, bodily sensations, and behaviors that accompany your character.

For instance, they might think something like: “It’s now or never.”

Or perhaps they don’t really think anything through (there’s no time to think about it).

They might feel a sense of urgency, tense muscles (indicating a fight/flight response), heightened adrenaline, and show an immediate action like jumping the bad guy.

If you brainstorm like this for three or four personality traits (positive & negative), you’ll end up with well-rounded characters.

And more importantly: you know why they act the way they do, how it makes them feel, and if it’s something they can still change.

I wouldn’t recommend doing this for all your characters; just the main ones. Otherwise, your character creation will go on forever.

For your side-characters, what you need to know is how they usually act and what their goal is (if they don’t have their own goals and ambitions, they can seem rather flat).

Integrate Your Characters With Your Plot

Now, if you’ve been thinking about your plot before you’ve started creating your characters, you can also use this method to align your main character(s) with your plot.

How?

Consider your main beginning event, the inciting incident, the thing that kicks off the entire story.

What is the situation? How do you think your character will react (their key reaction within that situation)?

From there, you can brainstorm, based on that action, what types of feelings, thoughts, and bodily sensations accompany that action.

Then brainstorm their underlying belief.

From there, you can consider their strategy and their backstory for that particular belief.

Generally, you want your protagonist to grow throughout your plot. This means that how they react at the start should be different from how they react at the end.

Consider the belief that’s associated with your beginning. How do you want this to change in the ending climax of your story?

For instance, if you’re writing a romance story where the main character rebuffs advances because they believe no one can be trusted, you might want them to accept their love for the love interest by the end because they now believe some people can be trusted.

Once you know where you want the belief to be at the end, you can brainstorm how this belief will change.

Our beliefs tend to be quite fixed. If you want this to change, your character needs to become conscious of them. Which doesn’t happen until their belief is challenged.

So, consider which obstacles would challenge your character’s belief.

For instance, confront your character who doesn’t trust people with characters who are trustworthy and put their trust in other people—even if they get burned sometimes.

I hope this method has given you a different perspective on how you could create your characters. It’s especially neat if you’re looking for a way to integrate your character’s journey with your external obstacles.

About the Author:

Iris Marsh is an editor and the author of the YA contemporary fantasy novel Illuminated. Iris feels everyone has a story to tell, and she loves to help other authors hone their story so they can share it with the world. To her, building the confidence of authors is key. That way, they don’t just have a better story, but they also feel more confident sharing it. If you’re currently struggling with editing your novel, check out her website for tips and her free self-editing course.

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