How to Develop a Character Narrative That Inspires Your Work Life
It doesn’t matter what your job is or how much you love it, work is never fun and exciting 100 percent of the time. There will be days where you feel bored, uninspired, and burnt out. For some, this is the norm. Whether it’s once a month or every day, feeling this way will drag you down and throw you into a cycle that is difficult to get out of.
If you find yourself in this situation, you need to get inspired and engaged once again before you become permanently miserable. If you’re a writer, you can use your own craft to pick yourself up and re-ignite your passion. Creative writing opens a beautiful realm of possibilities where anything can be real.
Use this to your advantage and create a narrative that inspires and empowers you. Step into a new world and create experiences that you’d like to have, and use them to keep you going. Use these tips to develop an exciting and inspiring character narrative.
Create a Backstory
A character narrative is nothing without a proper backstory. This is what gives it depth and meaning. You can use elements of your own life to create this backstory that’s supposed to inspire you. Don’t stick too close to reality though. It’s fiction – elaborate and embellish as much as you want.
The backstory needs to be detailed, believable, and meaningful. It creates the base for the story and is a huge part of who your character is today, and why. There needs to have been some sort of hardship or conflict – a story is never built on a perfect life.
This can be an overwhelming part of the process and it’s easy to forget the little things that are crucially important. This is when a character profile template is a useful tool.
This will help you flesh out the important details while ensuring you remember everything that could possibly be helpful and relevant.
Make the Character Believable
This is a golden rule of storytelling but it’s especially important for your endeavor of self-inspiration. No matter how fantastical your story is and how many magical powers your main character may have, they still need to resemble a human being in character, emotion, and experience.
A believable character has flaws and weaknesses. Even the hero is imperfect and this is what makes them relatable. Even the best human beings on this planet have flaws and negative tendencies, and so must your character.
They also need to be emotionally vulnerable. They can’t be closed off or no reader will get to know them enough to care about them. Use events and circumstances to show your character’s personality, strength, respect, and compassion. Or, you can use the same events to showcase their lack of these things and other negative traits like their temper and pet peeves.
Find the proper balance and you’ll have a strong, believable character. Not too perfect, but not too evil either. Their negative qualities shouldn’t be irredeemable. They should be things that are worked on and improved throughout the narrative.
Show Motivation
It doesn’t matter how fleshed out and believable your character is if the story is flat and boring. Your main character needs a meaningful and legitimate motivation behind what they’re doing throughout your story.
Examples include avenging the death of a loved one, working towards an accomplishment or title, winning over a romantic interest, etc. This is their main goal. They should have a goal and a reason for chasing their goals.
Motivation is crucial for advancing and enriching the plot but it also reveals a lot about their character. There can be multiple reasons for achieving the same thing, and why your character is doing it will say a lot about who they are. This applies to their “main” goal as well as the smaller goals, desires, and decisions throughout the story.
Why did they stop and help someone? Was it out of pure selflessness or did they get something out of it? Why do they want to romance a person? Are they truly interested or are they trying to manipulate or use them?
The motivation behind an action can be so telling and it’s important that you make it known.
Show Change
Your main character should be dynamic. This means they need to change and grow throughout the story. This is perhaps one of the most important elements that will inspire you. As you bring your character through inner change and development, it can inspire you to do the same in your life. You may even think of practical, applicable ideas from your own brainstorming and writing.
The change you create within your character is paramount to the development of your narrative. Everything that happens will affect your character in some way and either contribute to or impede their ability to grow.
Use a character development template to help you create a believable and effective development cycle. This template includes questions and prompts that help you see how the life of your character will unfold within the timeline of your story.
This will not only help you remember all the important details but it gives you a visual of your character and their story arc.
Inspire Yourself
Creating anything new and artistic is always fun and challenging. Creativity is a fantastic outlet for frustration and expression. It opens your mind to new possibilities and instills a sense of wonder and inspiration that can spill into any area of your life.
Put your writing skills to good use and create a character narrative that inspires your own life.