The best characters want something badly. When people or circumstances block the protagonist from getting what he wants we have conflict. Consider what would thwart our protagonist from reaching his goal, then give the power to block the goal to your antagonist. Why does she block our hero? Because her desire is both opposite and as intense as your protagonist’s desire. Give this opposition a two-way urgency: a deadline, a ticking clock. Whether you’re writing literary fiction or genre, your protagonist must have a fierce desire and someone or something must block him from what he wants.

Many of us fall in love with our characters. Like a parent, we want to shield them from arguments, injury, embarrassment, all the things that sensible people shy away from. If we devise a situation that gives our character pain, we take the action “off-camera.” Fight this impulse, writers! Fight it with everything you’ve got.

Look at a scene and ask yourself, what is the worst possible thing that could happen to my character at this moment? Enact it and see how your character deals with adversity. Make sure he’s operating with maximum capacity.

That said, it’s a wise writer that doesn’t swing so far that her characters resemble Job.  Your readers grow fatigued with all that trouble. Astrid Magnussen in White Oleander is an example of the writer giving her poor protagonist too many hardships to overcome. Obviously that’s a matter of taste, and a lot of people disagree with me.

Vary the trouble. The reader's interest is piqued when your character is embarrassed, fearful or falls in or out of love. Readers love to be surprised.
To create surprise,  look at your pivotal scenes and asks yourself what's likely to happen next. Then write the exact opposite of that.

When you finish your novel, chart the intensity of trouble and see what kind of pattern it forms. Do you have a rising sense of trouble as your novel reaches its climax?

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Seventy-five to ninety percent of human communication is non-verbal. We recognize most of these reactions immediately: she bit her lip, she felt her palms grow sweaty, she gulped, her throat tightened, her stomach clenched—you get the picture. These are what’s known as physical clichés and every writer knows what we do with clichés: we shun them.

According to Francine Prose in Reading Like A Writer, if the reader can intuit the character’s reaction, it’s unnecessary to write it. The exception is when the character has a different reaction from the one the reader expected.

But see how good writing puts the lie to that wisdom. Consider this action from Susan Whitcher’s novel, Stone Brothers: Andy stood. His knees seemed unpinned, he had to grip the table edge. Rat’s teeth gnawed his diaphragm. But he stood. The reader may have known that Andy was upset but note how the knowledge deepens in this description.

When we write about a character’s physical reactions, those reactions need to be particular. They need to inform the story. Back to Francine Prose: Properly used gestures—plausible, in no way stagy or extreme, yet unique and specific— are like windows opening to let us see a person’s soul, his or her secret desires, fears or obsessions, the precise relations between that person and the self, between the self and the world…

 Great! So how do we achieve this? I suppose there are writers out there who have an eye for physicality the same way some writers have an ear for dialogue. It’s depressing and I hate them. For the rest of us poor strugglers, Prose suggests we tuck a little notebook in our pocket and begin people watching in earnest.

Here’s my tip: learn from other writers. Just like a stack of Elmore Leonard novels will improve our dialogue, Erika Krouse, Jennifer Egan and Antonya Nelson are the queens of physicality on the page. There are hundreds of other writers that achieve this effect.

Underline phrases that speak to you. Keep a notebook of them so that you can read them over and over.

This plus chair time and we’ll all write brilliant prose. That’s a promise.

When Ann Patchett was asked how she kept a large cast of characters distinct from one another in the readers’ mind, she said that she studied Chekhov. “Nobody does a better job with a one-sentence walk-on character having a complete and distinct personality than Chekov…He never lets anybody fall through the cracks, no matter how tiny.

So I pulled out  a collection of Chekhov’s stories and came up with a handful of examples:

A short , fat little man, with a plump , shaven face wearing a top hat and a fur coat that swung open…the stranger’s voice a warm, cordial note.

 …a tall and broad shouldered man of about forty years of age. With his elbows on the table and his head resting on his hands he slept…his fair hair, his thick, broad nose, his sunburnt cheeks, and the beetling brows that hung over his closed eyes…Taken one by one, all his features—his nose, his cheeks, his eyebrows—were as rude and heavy as the furniture in “The Traveller”; taken together they produced an effect in singular harmony and beauty.

 From the visitor’s voice and movements it was evident that he had been in a state of violent agitation. Exactly as though he had been frightened by a fire or a mad dog, he could hardly restrain his hurried breathing, and he spoke quickly in a trembling voice.

 Her broad, very serious, chilled face; her thick, black eyebrows; the stiff collar on her jacket which prevented her from moving her head freely; her dress tucked up out of the dew; and her whole figure, erect and slight, pleased him.

 Simeon who was an old man of about sixty, skinny and toothless, but broad-shouldered and healthy, was drunk.

These characters are not only distinct in the way they’re described, but each character’s speech is unique as well.

Now give each character their own fears and desires, their particular agenda and what you have is a character as real as your own family.

Here’s my newest tip from the storymeister, James N Frey: before you begin your novel, make a list of everything you want your reader to know about your character by the end of the story. Then put the list away and write your book.

When you’re finished with a good working draft, review your list. Did you exploit everything you intended to tell the reader? Then ask yourself: are the details that you didn’t exploit still relevant?