Today I bring you How to Research for a Book: 7 Methods That Actually Work. And yes, these are 7 methods I’ve used, so I know what I’m talking about. If you’ve ever sat down to write a novel and realized you don’t actually know how a detective dusts for fingerprints — or what a medieval blacksmith’s shop smells like — you already understand why research matters. Knowing how to research for a book is one of the most underrated skills a fiction writer can develop. I learned this the hard way when I wrote a chase scene set in Tokyo without ever checking a subway map. My beta reader, who lives there, had notes. A lot of notes.

So let’s talk about it. Whether you’re writing fantasy, historical fiction, or a contemporary thriller, research is what separates a flat story from one that pulls readers in and makes them forget they’re reading at all. In this post, I’m breaking down seven practical ways I approach research for a book — and how you can use them to write fiction that feels real.

Why Bother Researching Fiction at All?

I get this question more than you’d think. “It’s made up, Emily. Why does it matter?” Because readers can tell. Even in a fantasy world with dragons and floating cities, there’s an internal logic that needs to hold together. Research gives you the raw material to build that logic.

Think about it this way: your imagination is the engine, but research is the fuel. Without it, you’re running on fumes — and your story will feel thin. With it, you have the confidence to write scenes that breathe.

1. Research Your World Before You Build It

World-building is one of the most exciting parts of writing fiction, and it’s also where learning how to research for a book pays off the fastest. I don’t care if your setting is 14th-century France or a colony on Mars — grounding your world in real details makes it stick.

When I was working on a story set in a coastal fishing village, I spent a week reading about tidal patterns, boat repair, and the economics of small-scale fishing. Did all of that end up in the book? No. But it showed up in the texture of the writing — in how a character tied a knot, or how she talked about the weather.

Start with the basics of your setting: geography, climate, economy, daily routines. Then go deeper. Look into the kinds of food people eat, the tools they use, the sounds they hear at night. These sensory details are what turn a backdrop into a place your reader can walk through.

2. Dig Into Psychology for Stronger Characters

Characters are where your story lives or dies, and research can make the difference between a cardboard cutout and someone who keeps readers turning pages at 2 a.m.

I’ve found that reading about psychology — even casually — gives me a much better handle on motivation, trauma responses, attachment styles, and the messy ways people actually behave under pressure. For one of my characters who struggled with grief, I read personal essays and memoirs from people who’d lost someone suddenly. That research didn’t just inform the character’s arc; it changed the entire tone of the book.

You don’t need a degree in psychology to do this. Start with accessible books like The Gift of Fear by Gavin de Becker or Attached by Amir Levine. Read interviews. Browse forums where people share lived experiences. Just be respectful and remember you’re there to listen, not to mine someone’s pain for plot points.

3. Get the Facts Right (Even in Fantasy)

Nothing pulls a reader out of a story faster than a factual error they happen to know about. If your character is a surgeon, you need to understand basic operating room procedure. If she’s a lawyer, you should know what a deposition actually looks like — not just what you’ve seen on TV.

This is where targeted research comes in. When I figure out how to research for a book that involves specialized knowledge, I usually follow a three-step process: I start with a broad overview (Wikipedia is fine for this, don’t @ me), then I read a couple of more detailed sources, and finally I try to find someone who actually works in the field and ask them a few specific questions.

You’d be surprised how willing professionals are to help writers get things right. A fifteen-minute conversation with a nurse, a mechanic, or a park ranger can give you the kind of detail you’d never find in a textbook.

4. Use Language Research to Write Better Dialogue

Dialogue is tricky. It needs to sound natural without actually being natural — real conversations are full of ums, tangents, and incomplete thoughts that would drive a reader crazy on the page. But it also needs to reflect who your characters are, and that means doing some homework on how people actually talk.

If your story is set in a specific region or time period, spend some time studying the local dialect, slang, and speech patterns. For a project set in 1970s Brooklyn, I listened to old radio interviews, watched documentaries, and read oral histories. It wasn’t about copying the dialect word for word — it was about understanding the rhythm and attitude behind it.

Even for contemporary settings, pay attention to how different age groups, professions, and social circles communicate. A teenage barista and a retired military officer are not going to use the same vocabulary, and getting those distinctions right makes your dialogue pop.

5. Research Cultures With Respect and Depth

If you’re writing characters from a cultural background that isn’t your own, research isn’t optional — it’s a responsibility. And I mean real research, not a quick Google search and a couple of stereotypes dressed up in nice prose.

I approach this by reading works by authors from that culture first. Fiction, nonfiction, poetry, essays — whatever I can get my hands on. Then I look for cultural guides, documentaries, and academic sources that go beyond surface-level customs. I also try to find sensitivity readers who can flag things I might miss.

The goal isn’t to become an expert on someone else’s experience. It’s to write with enough understanding and care that your portrayal feels honest rather than exploitative. That takes time, humility, and a willingness to revise when you get something wrong.

6. Let Research Spark Your Plot Ideas

Some of my best plot twists have come straight from research. History is full of bizarre true stories that are stranger than anything I could dream up. Scientific discoveries, unsolved mysteries, obscure legal cases — all of it is fair game when you’re looking for narrative fuel.

When I’m stuck on a plot, I’ll often take a detour into a topic that’s loosely connected to my story’s themes. If I’m writing about power dynamics, I might read about historical rebellions. If I’m exploring loneliness, I might look into the psychology of isolation. These tangents almost always give me something I didn’t know I was looking for.

Keep a research journal or a dedicated folder in your notes app. When you stumble across a fact or story that sparks something, write it down — even if you don’t know how it fits yet. You’ll thank yourself later.

7. Research Settings to Write Scenes That Feel Alive

Description is one of those things that can go very right or very wrong. Too little, and your reader is floating in a void. Too much, and they’re skimming paragraphs. The sweet spot? Specific, evocative details — and those come from research.

If you can visit the place your story is set, do it. Walk around, take notes, pay attention to what you smell, hear, and feel. If you can’t visit, lean on travel writing, photography, and documentaries. Google Street View is also surprisingly useful for getting a feel for a neighborhood’s vibe.

When I wrote a scene set in a mountain village during winter, I watched hours of footage from similar places. I read blog posts by hikers who’d been caught in snowstorms. I looked up what kind of birds you’d hear at that altitude. That level of specificity is what makes a scene land — and it all comes from knowing how to research for a book properly.

Practical Tips for Organizing Your Research

Before I wrap up, a few things I’ve learned about managing the research process itself, because it’s easy to fall into the rabbit hole and never come back out:

• Set a time limit. Give yourself a defined research phase before you start drafting. You can always go back for specific details later.
• Use a system. I keep a Notion database with tags by topic, but a simple folder structure works too. The point is being able to find things again.
• Separate “need to know” from “nice to know.” Not every interesting fact belongs in your book. Keep the extras in your notes and stay focused on what serves the story.
• Cite your sources. Even for fiction, keep a record of where you found information. It’s useful for fact-checking and for answering reader questions later on.

Start Researching, Then Start Writing

Learning how to research for a book isn’t about becoming a scholar or spending months in a library before you type a single word. It’s about building a habit of curiosity — asking questions, digging into the answers, and letting what you find shape your story in ways your imagination alone couldn’t.

Every book I’ve written has been better because of the research behind it. The worlds feel more real, the characters make more sense, and the plot holds together under scrutiny. That’s not a coincidence. So the next time you sit down to write, take a little time to look things up first. Your readers — and your story — will be better for it.

This post How to Research for a Book: 7 Methods That Work first appeared on Writing Prizes and is written by Emily Campbell

I used to think I was good at writing dialogue. Then I read my early drafts out loud and realized every single character sounded like me — a slightly anxious woman in her late twenties who uses too many dashes. That was a rough afternoon. But it was also the moment I started taking dialogue seriously as a craft, not just something that happens between the plot points. If you’re trying to figure out how to write realistic dialogue, the first thing to accept is that it’s a skill you build, not a gift you’re born with.

Dialogue does a lot of heavy lifting in fiction. It reveals character, moves the plot forward, creates tension, and sets the tone of a scene. When it works, readers barely notice it — they’re just inside the conversation. When it doesn’t, everything feels stiff or fake, and the reader disconnects. So let’s talk about what makes dialogue feel real and where most of us go wrong.

Realistic Dialogue Isn’t the Same as Real Speech

This trips up a lot of writers, especially early on. If you’ve ever transcribed an actual conversation, you know that real speech is a mess. People interrupt themselves, trail off, repeat words, say “um” fourteen times, and go on tangents that lead nowhere. Put that on a page and your reader will lose patience fast.

The trick with how to write realistic dialogue is creating the illusion of natural speech without the clutter. You want the rhythm and feel of a real conversation, but tighter. Every line should be doing something — showing us who the character is, advancing the scene, building tension, or landing a joke. If a line of dialogue isn’t doing at least one of those things, it probably doesn’t need to be there.

I think of it like editing a home video into a film. The raw footage is real, but it’s boring. The edited version feels real because someone made smart cuts.

Character Voice Is Everything

If you can swap two characters’ dialogue and nobody would notice, you have a problem. Each character should have a distinct way of speaking that reflects who they are — their background, education, personality, emotional state, and relationship to whoever they’re talking to.

A retired Marine doesn’t talk like a nineteen-year-old art student. A nervous person hedges and qualifies. A controlling person interrupts and redirects. Someone who grew up wealthy might be casually specific about things a working-class character wouldn’t mention at all.

When I’m developing a character’s voice, I ask myself a few questions:

• How educated are they, and do they lean into it or downplay it? Some people with PhDs talk casually on purpose. Some people without degrees use formal language to be taken seriously.
• Are they direct or indirect? Some characters say exactly what they mean. Others talk around things, and the real meaning lives in what they don’t say.
• What words would they never use? This one’s underrated. A tough, practical character probably doesn’t say “exquisite.” A shy teenager probably doesn’t deliver monologues.
• How do they behave in conflict? Some people get loud. Others get quiet. Some deflect with humour. The way a character argues tells you more about them than any description.

I keep a short voice sheet for each major character — just a few bullet points on their speech patterns, pet phrases, and verbal tics. It sounds fussy, but it saves me from writing six characters who all sound like variations of the same person.

Genre Shapes How Your Characters Talk

Dialogue doesn’t exist in a vacuum — it lives inside a genre, and each genre has its own expectations for how characters speak. Ignoring those expectations won’t make your writing fresh. It’ll just make it feel off.

In literary fiction, dialogue tends to be more layered and subtext-heavy. Characters might say one thing and mean another, and the reader is expected to pick up on the gap. In thrillers, dialogue is usually sharper and faster — short exchanges, high stakes, less room for reflection. In romance, dialogue carries a lot of emotional weight and often does double duty as both conflict and intimacy.

Fantasy and sci-fi come with their own challenges. You might be inventing slang, formal speech registers, or entirely new ways of communicating. The danger there is creating dialogue that sounds so constructed it pulls the reader out of the world you’ve built. Even in a made-up language or culture, the underlying emotion needs to feel human.

Read widely in your genre and pay attention to how the authors you admire handle conversation. Not to copy them — but to understand the range of what works within your genre’s expectations.

Time Period and Setting Change Everything

This is where a lot of writers either shine or fall apart. If your story is set in 1940s London, your characters can’t talk like they’re texting in 2025. But the opposite mistake is just as common — writing period dialogue that’s so stiff and formal it sounds like a museum exhibit rather than a living person.

When I ghostwrote a novel set in the 1960s American South, I spent a lot of time listening. Old interviews, radio recordings, documentaries with archival footage. I wasn’t trying to replicate the dialect exactly — that can come across as caricature if you’re not careful. I was trying to absorb the pace, the turns of phrase, the way people moved between formal and informal depending on who they were talking to.

For historical settings, a few practical guidelines I follow:

• Avoid obvious anachronisms. A Victorian character saying “okay” will pull a knowledgeable reader right out of the scene. Do a quick check on when common words and phrases entered the language.
• Don’t overdo the period flavour. You don’t need every sentence to sound archaic. A light touch — a phrase here, a speech pattern there — goes further than trying to make every line sound like a history textbook.
• Focus on formality levels. In most historical settings, people were more formal with strangers and authority figures than we are now. Getting those shifts right matters more than nailing specific vocabulary.

For contemporary settings, pay attention to how different communities actually talk. Regional slang, generational language, professional jargon — these details ground your dialogue in a real place and time without you having to spell it out.

Subtext: What Characters Don’t Say

The best dialogue has a layer underneath the words. People in real life rarely say exactly what they feel, and your characters shouldn’t either — at least not all the time. Learning how to write realistic dialogue means getting comfortable with the space between what a character says and what they actually mean.

Think about a couple fighting about whose turn it is to do the dishes. On the surface, it’s about dishes. Underneath, it’s about feeling unappreciated, or power dynamics, or the fact that one of them is checked out of the relationship. The dialogue stays on the dishes. The subtext tells the real story.

I was ghostwriting a scene once where two business partners were having lunch, and on paper, the conversation was polite — compliments, small talk, plans for the future. But one of them had just found out the other was trying to push her out of the company. So every polite line was loaded. “I love what you’ve done with the new office” became a completely different sentence when you knew the context. That scene got more reader feedback than almost anything else in the book, and it was all subtext.

A few ways to build subtext into your dialogue:

• Let characters avoid the topic. The thing they won’t bring up is often the most important thing in the scene.
• Use actions between lines. A character who says “I’m fine” while shredding a napkin is telling you two different things at once.
• Create information gaps. When one character knows something the other doesn’t, every line becomes charged.

Common Dialogue Mistakes (and How to Fix Them)

After years of writing and editing other people’s manuscripts, I’ve seen the same dialogue problems come up again and again. Here are the ones that bother me the most — and the ones that are easiest to fix.

Using Dialogue as an Info Dump

This is when characters tell each other things they would already know, purely for the reader’s benefit. “As you know, Sarah, our company was founded in 1987 and has grown to over 500 employees.” Nobody talks like that. If both characters already know something, find another way to get the information across — narration, a flashback, a document, anything but one character lecturing another on shared knowledge.

Too Many Dialogue Tags

“Said” is invisible to readers. “Exclaimed,” “proclaimed,” “queried,” “retorted” — those are not. Use “said” and “asked” for the vast majority of your tags, and let the dialogue itself carry the emotion. If the line is written well, you shouldn’t need the tag to tell the reader how it was delivered.

Even better, replace some tags with action beats. Instead of “I can’t do this anymore,” she said sadly, try “I can’t do this anymore.” She set her ring on the counter and walked out. The action does more work than any adverb.

Every Character Sounds the Same

I touched on this earlier, but it’s worth repeating because it’s so common. If you’re not sure whether your characters have distinct voices, try this: cover the dialogue tags and see if you can tell who’s speaking from the words alone. If you can’t, you need to spend more time developing individual voices.

Dialogue That’s Too On-the-Nose

Real people don’t narrate their emotions. “I’m angry because you betrayed my trust and now I feel like I can’t rely on anyone” is a therapy statement, not a line of dialogue. In a heated moment, a character is more likely to say something cutting, deflect, or shut down entirely. Let the behaviour show the feeling.

Forgetting That People Interrupt and Overlap

Clean, turn-taking dialogue where each person waits politely for the other to finish feels artificial, especially in tense scenes. People interrupt. They talk over each other. They finish each other’s sentences or cut someone off mid-thought. Using em dashes to show interruptions and ellipses to show trailing off adds a messy, human quality to your conversations.

The Read-Aloud Test Still Works

I know it sounds old-fashioned, but reading your dialogue out loud is still the single best way to catch problems. Your ear picks up things your eye misses — awkward phrasing, unnatural rhythms, lines that are too long, moments where the conversation loses energy.

When I’m deep in revisions, I’ll sometimes read scenes aloud using different voices for each character. It feels ridiculous and I would never do it with anyone else in the room. But it works. If a line makes me stumble or cringe when I say it, it’s getting rewritten.

You can also use text-to-speech software if reading aloud isn’t your thing. Hearing a robotic voice read your dialogue can be oddly clarifying — if it sounds stiff coming from a machine, it’ll sound stiff on the page too.

Write Dialogue That Earns the Reader’s Trust

At the end of the day, learning how to write realistic dialogue comes down to paying attention. Listen to how people around you actually talk — at coffee shops, in meetings, on the bus. Notice the rhythms, the interruptions, the things people say when they’re nervous versus when they’re confident. Then take all of that and compress it, shape it, and put it in the mouths of characters who feel specific and alive.

Good dialogue is invisible. The reader doesn’t stop to admire it — they just believe it. And that belief is what keeps them inside your story, turning pages, invested in people who only exist on paper. That’s the whole job.

This post How to Write Realistic Dialogue Your Readers Will Believe first appeared on Writing Prizes and is written by Emily Campbell

I need to tell you something embarrassing before we start. When I was nineteen, I spent two full years worldbuilding for a fantasy novel. I drew maps. I invented languages. I wrote a 40-page document on the political history of a fictional empire going back 600 years. And I never wrote the book. Not a single chapter. Because by the time I was done building the world, I realized the world didn’t fit the story I wanted to tell. The world had become the project, and the actual novel — the characters, the conflict, the thing a reader would care about — had disappeared somewhere behind a mountain range I’d named in a language I’d made up.

So when someone asks me how to do worldbuilding in a story, my first answer is always: make sure you still have a story. That’s not a joke. It’s the most important thing I can tell you, and it took me two wasted years to learn it.

Do You Actually Need Worldbuilding?

Before you start sketching maps or inventing customs, ask yourself a blunt question: does your story require it?

Not every book needs worldbuilding. If you’re writing contemporary fiction set in a real city, you don’t need to build a world — you need to describe one that already exists. Your job there is research and observation, not invention. Same goes for most literary fiction, memoir, and realistic genres. The world is already built. You just need to render it well.

Worldbuilding becomes necessary when your story takes place somewhere that doesn’t exist — or in a version of reality that’s been significantly altered. That covers a lot of ground:

• Fantasy — from epic secondary worlds to urban fantasy where magic sits alongside modern life
• Science fiction — whether you’re on a space station, a terraformed planet, or a near-future Earth reshaped by technology
• Dystopian and post-apocalyptic fiction — the rules of society have changed, and the reader needs to understand how
• Historical fiction with speculative elements — alternate histories, steampunk, magical realism layered over real events

If your story falls into one of these categories, yes, you need worldbuilding. But the amount you need is probably less than you think — and that’s where most of us get into trouble.

Start With the Story, Not the World

This is the single most useful thing I’ve learned about how to do worldbuilding in a story, and it goes against every instinct you have if you’re a fantasy or sci-fi writer who loves the building part.

Your world exists to serve your story. Not the other way around.

That means before you decide what the currency system looks like or how the magic works, you need to know what your story is actually about. Not the plot — the deeper thing underneath it. What’s the theme? What’s the question you’re exploring? What’s the emotional or moral core that’s going to make a reader care?

When I look back at my two years of wasted worldbuilding, the problem wasn’t that the world was bad. It was detailed and internally consistent and I was genuinely proud of it. The problem was that I built it in a vacuum. I didn’t start with a story question. I started with “wouldn’t it be cool if there were floating cities?” and just kept going from there. Cool doesn’t carry a novel. Theme does. Conflict does. Character does. The world is the stage — it’s not the play.

Your World Should Reflect Your Theme

Here’s where worldbuilding gets interesting from a craft perspective. The best fictional worlds aren’t just backdrops — they’re arguments. They embody the story’s themes in their structures, rules, and contradictions.

Think about it. If your story is about class inequality, then the physical and social structure of your world should make that inequality visible and felt. Maybe there’s a literal vertical divide — the wealthy live above, everyone else lives below. Maybe access to magic or technology is gatekept by birth. The world becomes a manifestation of what the story is trying to say.

If your theme is freedom versus security, build a world where that tension is baked into the landscape. A walled city that’s safe but suffocating. A wilderness that’s dangerous but limitless. Now your setting isn’t just scenery — it’s pulling the reader into the central question every time you describe a location.

This is what I mean by structural worldbuilding. You’re not building a world for completeness. You’re building the parts that press on the story’s bruises. Everything else can stay vague or implied.

The “What Does My Story Need?” Test

Every time I sit down to worldbuild now, I run every decision through one filter: does my story need this?

My character needs to travel from one city to another. Do I need a full map with every town along the route? No. I need to know how long the journey takes, what the terrain feels like, and whether the road is dangerous. Those details serve the scene. A comprehensive map serves my ego.

My story involves a magic system. Do I need to define every rule and limitation before I start writing? Maybe. If magic plays a central role in the conflict, then yes — the reader needs to understand the stakes, and you need internal consistency. But if magic is atmospheric rather than mechanical, you can keep it looser. Not every story needs a Sanderson-style hard magic system. Sometimes mystery is more powerful than rules.

A practical framework I use now:

• What does the plot require? Build the systems, locations, and rules that directly affect what happens in the story.
• What does the character require? Build the social structures, cultural norms, and power dynamics that shape who your characters are and what they want.
• What does the theme require? Build the elements that mirror, challenge, or complicate the central idea you’re exploring.
• Everything else? Leave it alone. Or keep it in your notes as background texture you can draw on if needed. But don’t let it into the manuscript unless it earns its place.

How to Know When to Stop

This is the hard one, because worldbuilding is genuinely fun. Drawing maps is fun. Naming things is fun. Figuring out how the economy of a fictional country works is weirdly satisfying. And that’s exactly why it’s dangerous. It feels productive without actually being productive — at least not in the way that gets a book written.

I know this because I lived it. Those two years I spent worldbuilding weren’t lazy years. I was working hard. I was thinking deeply. I was filling notebooks. I just wasn’t writing a novel. And at some point, the worldbuilding became a way to avoid the scarier, harder work of actually drafting — of putting characters on the page and making them do things and risking the possibility that it wouldn’t be good enough.

So here are my personal rules for when to stop:

Stop when you can describe your world in a conversation. If someone asks “what’s this story about and where does it take place?” and you can answer in a few sentences with enough detail to make them curious, you have enough. If you need twenty minutes and a whiteboard, you’ve gone too far.

Stop when you catch yourself avoiding the draft. Be honest with yourself. Are you still worldbuilding because you genuinely need more information to write the next scene? Or are you doing it because it’s more comfortable than facing the blank page? I’ve been on both sides of that line, and the difference is usually obvious if you’re willing to admit it.

Stop when the worldbuilding stops serving the story. If you’re building things that no character will ever interact with, no scene will ever reference, and no reader will ever see — you’re writing an encyclopedia, not a novel. Save it for the appendix if you want, but get back to the draft.

Stop when you’ve covered the three pillars. If you’ve built enough to support your plot, your characters, and your theme, that’s your foundation. You can always add more later as the draft reveals gaps. In fact, that’s a better way to do it — building reactively as the story tells you what it needs, rather than proactively trying to anticipate everything.

Build From the Ground Your Characters Walk On

One shift that completely changed how I approach worldbuilding: I stopped building top-down and started building from character level.

Top-down worldbuilding is when you start with the big picture — the continent, the history, the political systems — and work your way down to the individual’s daily life. It’s the approach I took at nineteen, and it’s the approach that leads to 40-page lore documents and no novel.

Character-level worldbuilding starts with a person. Where does she wake up in the morning? What does she eat? What does she see on her way to work? Who has power over her, and how does she feel about it? What’s normal to her that would be strange to us?

When you build this way, you only create what the story touches. Your character lives in a city? You need to know her neighbourhood, her daily routines, the parts of the city she’s afraid of. You don’t need a full city plan with population demographics — unless she’s a census worker, in which case, fair enough.

This approach also makes your worldbuilding feel more organic on the page. Instead of dumping exposition about how the government works, you show your character navigating a bureaucratic system that frustrates her. The reader learns the world by living in it alongside the character, which is always more engaging than being lectured about it.

The Iceberg Principle Still Holds

You’ve probably heard the Hemingway iceberg analogy applied to writing. It works perfectly for worldbuilding too. The reader should only see about ten to twenty percent of what you’ve built. The rest stays below the surface, giving the visible part weight and stability.

The mistake isn’t knowing more than you show. That’s actually ideal — it gives your writing confidence and consistency. The mistake is trying to show everything you know. That’s how you end up with three-page descriptions of a market square or a character monologuing about the history of a trade route that has nothing to do with the scene.

Trust your reader. Drop details naturally. Let them piece things together. A character casually mentioning that “the northern gates have been closed since the plague year” tells the reader a huge amount about this world — there was a plague, it was bad enough to be a landmark in time, the north is associated with danger or disease — without stopping the story for a history lesson.

Worldbuilding Is a Tool, Not a Destination

I still love worldbuilding. I probably always will. There’s something deeply satisfying about inventing a place and making it feel real. But I’ve learned — slowly, painfully, after two years of maps that led nowhere — that the world is only as good as the story it holds.

So if you’re figuring out how to do worldbuilding in a story, start with the story. Know your theme. Know your characters. Know what question you’re asking. Then build exactly as much world as you need to ask that question well — and not a page more. You can always go back and add. You can’t get back the months you spent building a world that doesn’t have a novel living inside it.

I wish someone had told me that when I was nineteen, hunched over my fifth hand-drawn map, convinced I was almost ready to start writing. I wasn’t. I was hiding. Don’t be nineteen-year-old me. Build the world your story needs, and then write the damn book.

This post How to Do Worldbuilding in a Story first appeared on Writing Prizes and is written by Emily Campbell

I used to think developing a character meant filling out one of those long character questionnaires — favourite colour, blood type, childhood pet, what they’d order at a restaurant. I’d answer sixty questions and still have no idea who this person was on the page. They had facts but no pulse. If you’ve been there, I want to save you some time: knowing your character’s favourite ice cream flavour will not help you write a better book. Knowing what they’d lie about will.

Learning how to develop a character for a story isn’t about accumulating trivia. It’s about understanding what drives a person, what scares them, what they want badly enough to act on, and where they’re wrong about themselves. That’s the stuff that makes a character feel alive — and it’s the stuff that gives your plot something to push against.

Start With What They Want

Every character worth reading about wants something. Not in a vague “she wants to be happy” way — in a specific, concrete, story-driving way. She wants to find her missing brother. He wants to win the custody battle. She wants to escape the country before the regime closes the borders.

The want is your engine. It’s what gets the character out of bed in the morning and into situations where interesting things happen. Without a clear want, you end up with a character who drifts through scenes reacting to whatever the plot throws at them, and readers can feel the difference between a character who’s driving the story and one who’s being dragged along by it.

I usually separate the want into two layers:

• The external want — the tangible goal. Get the job. Solve the murder. Survive the journey. This is what the plot is built around.
• The internal want — the deeper need they may not even be aware of. To feel worthy. To stop running from grief. To learn to trust someone. This is what the character arc is built around.

The tension between these two is where the magic happens. A character who wants to win a competition (external) but needs to learn that her self-worth isn’t tied to achievement (internal) is going to make choices that create conflict naturally — because what she’s chasing and what she actually needs are pulling in different directions.

Give Them a Flaw That Costs Them Something

Perfect characters are boring. I know you know this intellectually, but it’s surprisingly easy to write a protagonist who’s brave, smart, kind, funny, and good at everything — especially if you like them. We protect characters we love, and that instinct works against the story every time.

A flaw isn’t a cute quirk. “She’s clumsy” is not a flaw that matters unless her clumsiness actually causes problems that affect the plot. A meaningful flaw is a pattern of behaviour or belief that gets in the character’s way — that causes them to make bad decisions, hurt people they care about, or sabotage the thing they want most.

Some flaws I’ve built characters around that actually did work in the story:

• A woman who’s so terrified of conflict that she lets people walk over her until she explodes at the worst possible moment
• A man who’s so focused on being right that he destroys every close relationship he has
• A teenager who lies compulsively — not out of malice, but because she learned early that the truth never protected her

Notice that each of these flaws has a root. The woman avoids conflict because of something in her past. The man needs to be right because being wrong once cost him dearly. The teenager lies because honesty was dangerous in her childhood. That root is what makes a flaw feel human rather than arbitrary, and it gives you somewhere to go with the character arc.

Backstory Is Fuel, Not the Story

Backstory is one of the trickiest parts of figuring out how to develop a character for a story, because you need to know it but you need to resist the urge to dump it all on the reader.

I write extensive backstories for my main characters. Pages of it sometimes. Where they grew up, what their family was like, the formative experiences that shaped their beliefs and fears. I do this because it helps me understand why they behave the way they do in the present-tense story. But most of that backstory never appears on the page — at least not directly.

The reader doesn’t need a flashback to your character’s difficult childhood to understand why she flinches when someone raises their voice. They just need to see her flinch and feel the weight of it. The backstory is in the room even when it’s not on the page, and that invisible presence is what gives a character depth.

A rule I follow: backstory earns its way into the text only when the present-tense story demands it. If a past event is directly relevant to a choice the character is making right now, it can come in — briefly, and woven into the action, not as a standalone flashback that stops the plot cold. Otherwise, it stays in my notes where it belongs.

Voice Makes or Breaks a Character

You can do everything else right — clear want, meaningful flaw, rich backstory — and still end up with a flat character if their voice doesn’t feel distinct. Voice is how a character thinks and speaks, and it’s the thing that makes a reader feel like they’re in the presence of a specific human being rather than a generic placeholder.

Voice shows up in word choice, sentence rhythm, what a character notices and what they ignore, what they find funny, and how they process stress. A cynical ex-cop narrating a crime novel sounds completely different from a sheltered eighteen-year-old narrating a coming-of-age story — not just in what they say, but in how their minds move through a scene.

When I ghostwrote a memoir for a retired firefighter, the biggest challenge wasn’t getting the facts right — it was capturing how he talked and thought. He spoke in short, blunt sentences. He described emergencies with clinical calm and fell apart talking about his daughter’s wedding. He never used a metaphor in his life. Getting his voice right meant stripping out every instinct I had toward literary prose and writing the way he experienced the world — direct, physical, unsentimental except when it caught him off guard.

A few things that help me nail voice:

• Write a page of stream-of-consciousness from your character’s perspective. Don’t plan it. Just let them think on the page. What comes out will tell you a lot about how their mind works.
• Pay attention to what they wouldn’t say. A reserved character won’t narrate their emotions directly. A blunt character won’t soften their language. The absences are as revealing as the words.
• Read your character’s dialogue out loud. If you stumble or it sounds like it could come from anyone, the voice isn’t specific enough yet.

Characters Exist in Relationship to Other People

One mistake I made early on was developing characters in isolation — building each one as a standalone profile and then putting them together in scenes. The problem with that approach is that people don’t exist in isolation. Who we are shifts depending on who we’re with, and your characters should do the same.

A character who’s confident and sharp at work might be awkward and unsure at a family dinner. Someone who’s gentle with their kids might be ruthless in a negotiation. These contradictions aren’t inconsistencies — they’re what makes a character feel three-dimensional.

When I’m developing a cast, I think about each significant relationship as its own dynamic. What does Character A bring out in Character B? What do they avoid talking about? Where’s the tension, and where’s the ease? A lot of characterisation happens not in how you describe someone but in how they behave differently around different people.

The most useful exercise I’ve found for this: write the same scene twice from two different characters’ perspectives. A dinner, an argument, a car ride — anything where they’re together. You’ll quickly see where their perceptions clash, and that clash is where the interesting stuff lives.

The Arc Is the Character Changing Under Pressure

A character arc is just a fancy way of saying: this person is different at the end of the story than they were at the beginning, and the events of the story are what changed them.

Not every character needs a dramatic transformation. Sometimes the arc is subtle — a small shift in perspective, a new willingness to be vulnerable, a quiet letting go of something they’ve been carrying. But something has to move. A character who goes through an entire novel and comes out exactly the same on the other side leaves the reader feeling like the story didn’t matter.

The arc should connect to the flaw and the internal want. If her flaw is that she can’t trust anyone, the arc might take her from isolation to letting one person in — not a total personality overhaul, just a crack in the wall. If his flaw is arrogance, the arc might humble him through failure without turning him into a completely different person.

I plan arcs loosely. I know roughly where the character starts emotionally, the key moments that challenge their beliefs, and where I want them to land. But I leave room for the draft to surprise me. Some of the best character moments I’ve written weren’t planned — they emerged because I knew the character well enough that their reaction to a situation I hadn’t anticipated felt inevitable.

Common Mistakes That Flatten Characters

After years of writing and ghostwriting, I’ve seen the same character development problems show up repeatedly — in my own work and in manuscripts I’ve been hired to fix. These are the ones that do the most damage.

Telling the Reader Who the Character Is Instead of Showing Them

“Sarah was brave and independent” tells me nothing I’ll believe. Sarah sprinting into a burning building to grab her neighbour’s dog while everyone else stands on the pavement — that I believe. Characters are defined by their actions under pressure, not by adjectives in the narration.

Mistaking Backstory for Personality

A tragic past doesn’t automatically make a character interesting. What makes them interesting is how they carry it. Two characters can have the same traumatic childhood and respond in completely different ways — one shuts down, the other overcompensates with control. The backstory is the cause. The personality is the effect. Don’t confuse the two.

Making Side Characters Into Furniture

Your supporting cast doesn’t need the same depth as your protagonist, but they do need to feel like they have lives beyond their function in the plot. The best side characters have at least one clear want and one clear trait that makes them feel like a person rather than a prop. If a side character exists only to deliver information or support the main character, the reader will notice the flatness even if they can’t articulate why.

Changing the Character to Serve the Plot

This one hurts because it usually happens when you’re deep in a draft and you need the character to do something they wouldn’t do for the plot to work. So you force it. And the reader feels the gears grinding. If your character wouldn’t realistically make the choice the plot needs them to make, the problem is with the plot, not the character. Go back and change the circumstances until the choice makes sense.

The Character Is the Story

At the end of the day, figuring out how to develop a character for a story is really figuring out what your story is about — because they’re the same thing. The character’s want drives the plot. The character’s flaw creates the conflict. The character’s arc gives the story meaning. Get the character right and half your structural problems solve themselves. Get them wrong and no amount of clever plotting will save you.

I think back to those character questionnaires I used to fill out, listing favourite foods and zodiac signs, and I don’t regret them entirely — they were me trying to know my characters the only way I knew how at the time. But what I wish I’d understood sooner is that a character doesn’t come alive through details about them. They come alive through what they do when things get hard, what they’re willing to lose, and how they change when the story won’t let them stay the same.

That’s the work. It’s harder than filling out a questionnaire. But it’s the reason people remember characters for years after they close the book.

This post How to Develop a Character for a Story Step By Step first appeared on Writing Prizes and is written by Emily Campbell