by Sarah Sally Hamer

We’re often taught to build characters the way you’d assemble a dossier: a handful of traits, a wound, a desire, a flaw, a bit of backstory to explain the rest. But real people don’t move through the world as collections of adjectives. Neither do characters. They move as bodies with breath, tension, instinct, and the quiet calculations of safety that happen long before thought.

But they’re just characters, right?

Yes, I guess so. But characters are created from our imagination and our knowledge of humans, even if we don’t recognize or think about it when we’re creating them. If your characters don’t act like real people, no one will believe them on the page.  

In fact, a character’s nervous system is the truest map of who they are, just as it is with real people. It’s the part of them that reacts before they can choose, the part that remembers what they survived, the part that decides whether the world is a place to approach or endure. When you begin here — in the body rather than the biography — the character stops feeling like a construction and starts feeling like someone you could sit beside and recognize.

Every person carries a baseline state

We all have a way our body organizes itself around danger, hope, longing, and uncertainty. So do characters. Some move through the world with a kind of forward-leaning intensity, as if everything requires a shield. Others stay in motion, not because they are adventurous but because stillness feels like exposure. Some go quiet, not out of shyness but because their inner world is louder than anything around them. And some soften themselves into whatever shape keeps the peace, reading the emotional weather of a room with the accuracy of a barometer. These reactions to outside stimulus create the traits we use to protect ourselves and, if your characters aren’t doing the same thing, they aren’t real.

These states are not personality traits. They are survival strategies. And survival strategies shape everything: the cadence of a sentence, the way a character enters a room, the metaphors they reach for, the silences they fall into, the people they gravitate toward, the people they avoid, the choices they make when they believe no one is watching.

I really see this in beginning writers.

I don’t want to sound like a writer has to write for decades to be able to create realistic characters, but many forget to follow through on a situation. For instance, some writers create an intense scene where a human would probably react with a huge emotion, but don’t allow their characters to do so. A critique partner wrote a American Civil War story where a woman finds out her children have been sold. Her reaction in the manuscript was to ask where they were. I suggest that the woman should jump up, screaming demands, trying to force the man to tell her where they had gone. It’s a matter of extreme and overwhelming anger and grief, not calm. At least, that’s what I would have done in a similar situation. (Just for what it’s worth, no two humans – and therefore, no two characters – will react in exactly the same way.)

How to enhance your character’s nervous system

Through dialogue

Make it inevitable rather than engineered. A character who lives in a braced, defensive body will speak in sharp edges and quick conclusions. Someone who survives by staying in motion will talk in spirals, circling ideas without landing. A character who freezes will speak in pauses and half-thoughts, as if language has to thaw before it can reach the page. And someone who has learned to stay safe by pleasing others will speak in softeners, gentle pivots, and careful calibrations of tone.

Shift the character arc

Instead of forcing a character to “grow,” notice how their body learns safety. A character who has always braced might finally unclench. Someone who has always run might take one still breath. Someone who has always softened themselves might finally hold their own shape. These are small movements, but they are the kind that change a life — and therefore a story.

Use relationships to create new texture

Match characters against each other by understanding the nervous systems inside them. Two characters who both survive by appeasing others will create a quiet ache, each waiting for the other to declare a preference. A character who freezes paired with someone who flees will create distance without ever meaning to. Someone who fights paired with someone who fawns will create a dynamic that feels inevitable, even if neither of them wants it. These patterns are not plot devices; they are the emotional physics of human connection and very real in the human realm.

Make sure you don’t forget the visceral reactions of the body

Write from the pulse of emotion instead of writing from the mind. Use the involuntary action of the body to bring the character back into focus. How do they breathe when they’re alone? What happens in their chest when someone they love or are afraid of says their name? What part of them tightens when they hear footsteps behind them? These are the questions that reveal a person.

The best place I can send you to learn visceral reactions is margielawson.com. She has several lecture packets that helped me immensely to understand and reframe a lot of my writing. I recommend Visceral Rules: Beyond Hammering Hearts. She knows her stuff!

Final Thought

Remember, a character is not built from adjectives but from the way their body braces against the world. Before they speak, their nervous system has already chosen the tone. And when they finally change, it isn’t because the plot demanded it — it’s because something inside them softened, warmed, or steadied enough to let a new possibility in.

Write from that place, and your characters won’t just appear on the page.
They’ll arrive.

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About Sally

Sarah "Sally" Hamer has a B.S. in Psychology (which only makes her dangerous) and an MLA in history and philosophy. She is a multi‑award‑winning author (with two RWA Golden Heart finals) who has taught creative and nonfiction writing at LSUS for over twenty years.

She writes for two of the top one‑hundred writing blogs in the world (writersinthestormblog.com and thewriteconversation.blogspot.com), teaches online for three academies, and has been a long‑time columnist for The Best of Times senior magazine. She speaks nationally on writing, history, and philosophy, and believes wholeheartedly that every human being is an amazing story waiting to be told. She can be reached at sa***@***********al.org.

Featured picture from Pixabay.com