Blog - The Rogue MFA

Kelly ChastainApril 16, 2026

3 Elements of Complex Characters

And how to Frankenstein them all together to, hopefully, better outcomes. Or not.

Some of my favorite stories have the most vivid and complicated characters, and I’m guessing yours do too. When a character is so singular, we can’t help but fall in love. Last week, Bri set us up with a character interview. And today, I’m going to show you a few pillars of character development that will help you turn your red-headed orphan into Anne of Green Gables.

AKA – WHY are we filling out that character interview in the first place?

Establish Your Character’s Credibility

Credibility helps your readers understand what’s normal for this character, the world they live in, and how they navigate it. This is why stereotypes are so powerful. Right or wrong, they become a shorthand for what we expect from a certain type of person.

For example: The owner of an international big box store vs. the owner of a Mom & Pop general store in a farming community of 1,000 people. Same type of job, radically different type of person. Establishing a type is simply a building block that you can use to carve your unique character out of.

Ways to establish credibility:

What’s appropriate for this character? And by that, I mean – what’s a reasonable expectation for this type of character?
What’s the social/biological breakdown? Gender, race, class, age – all the ways humans discriminate against one another. Ew, gross, but also important to know because…
- If you leave these details out, the story will be slow to take off because readers, right or wrong, can’t get a grasp on who this person is supposed to be or how they’re supposed to act.
- Establish this early, so you can immediately correct the record for how this character acts, and then uphold or subvert expectations.

Establish Your Character’s Purpose

Understanding the reason this character is in the narrative gives us something to hope for, and helps establish the direction the story might go. All of this props up the reader’s expectations, which you can immediately subvert or not.

Ways to establish purpose:

Determine what your character wants. Are they looking for love, or to cope with the suffocating small town life they’re living, or to help other people escape enemy occupied territory?
- When writers don’t establish what their characters want, they’ll wander the saggy middle of their novel with no idea of how to get to the end.
What’s the point of having this character in the narrative at all? Which, I admit, sounds a little existential, but understanding their role in your story also illuminates the kind of character they are or can be.
- Not everyone has MC energy and that’s a good thing.

Establish Your Character’s Complexity

Complexity is what makes us love a character, grip the pages with wide eyes as they make very out of character decisions, which reveals their ability to change and grow over the course of the story. While they don’t have to have the range of a yo-yo, they do need some flexibility in their decision making. It’s most fun when a character is downright confounding at times. When they spiral of their axis. When they finally do the thing they’ve been resisting, believe in themselves, or take the big risk.

Ways to establish complexity:

Determine your character’s values. They might hold onto certain rules about life right up until the thing or person they love most is threatened. Then it all goes out the window.
Determine your character’s beliefs. If they hold something to be incorruptible, and operate from that belief set, you open a whole host of opportunities for that belief system to fail or be abandoned. That makes them human and full of nuance.
Determine your character’s strengths. Are they a wizard with language but an absolute dunce when it comes to relationships?
- Where do they shine, and where does it makes sense that they should shine, but don’t?

Most readers aren’t looking for that perfect hero or heroine, but a real messy human in all their glory. Because at the end of the day, we’re all complex, nuanced, and hoping like hell we aren’t failing too badly. When we see that on the page, it reaffirms that we’re all in this together.

“Read” this post as a YouTube video instead, if you’re so inclined!

Join our Writing Community Hour over on The Rogue MFA YouTube channel (which meets every other Thursday evening at 4pm PST/ 7pm EST), where we’ll be building routine and community with YOU. Subscribe to get notified, and if you’re even a little bit interested, please fill out our quick survey so we can expand these in the future with you in mind.

Bri CastelliniApril 9, 2026

7 Character Interview Prompts That Actually Work

Because readers crave truly unforgettable characters

For me, all stories are rooted in character. Even if the spark of my idea as captured by my Dump Doc is a situation or trope, it can’t become a novel for me until I personally fall in love with who’s in that situation or dragged through that trope kicking and screaming.

As a result, fleshing out characters is just as important to my writing process as the outline phase, which I’m on the record saying is what I consider my first draft. But most standard character design templates are either complicated for the sake of complexity, or too vague to function, and rarely get to the true core of who these people are and what makes them tick.

So we’ve designed our own! Paid subscribers to the Substack can get the download for our fillable Character Template at the bottom of this post, but for everyone else, I’ve picked my seven favorite prompts as a starting point.

Physical descriptions

Unless you’re writing sci-fi about brains in jars, your character has a physical form that will probably come up at some point. So what best describes their ~~horrible visage~~ ~~meat sack~~ basic aesthetic characteristics?

Prominent physical features. Does this character, like most romance heroes, have a twice-broken nose? Freckles? A dramatic scar over one eye? A centered front tooth like Tom Cruise? When people in your book describe your character to others… what do they focus on? What stands out and makes them unique, beyond that they have startling violet eyes, auburn hair, and an aquiline nose (no shade to romantasy heroines with these descriptions, I too imprinted early on Alanna the Lioness)?
Scents. As we walk you through in our Free Mini Course, you’ve got five senses, so use ‘em! What does your character smell like, naturally? What scents define them and their day to day lives? If they work at a cafe, they probably always smell faintly of coffee grounds and buttery pastry. If they’re outdoorsy, maybe they smell like freshly cut grass and sun-warmed skin. To build upon this scent-ual journey, what scents does your character favor in ways that other people can pick up? A fruity shampoo, Chanel No 5 they inherited from a beloved grandmother, fresh herbs from their medicinal lotion?

Background

From where did this person spring forth? What, and who, made them who they are today?

Parents. Are your characters’ parents still together, is one or both dead, was there a nasty divorce? Who is/was your character closest with, and why? Or did they not know their parents at all/lost them young, who did they latch onto like a duckling for mentorship and surrogate support?
Cliques. In school/as a child… how would their peers categorize them? Were they a jock or a nerd? A theater kid or a gleek? A goth or a burnout? And does that external categorization suit them because it’s a good shorthand… or because they carefully curated that perception for their own purposes?
First Rejection/Failure. Be this a rejection by a crush, disappointing their parents, failing a test, not making a sports team, or something more angsty… what would your character consider their first time wanting something and not getting it? And how did that rejection define failure for them as they grew up?

Community

Who are the people your character sees consistently? And are they adding something to the book… or do they simply exist? All characters, even side characters, should be narratively supporting (or impeding) the goals and/or desires of your protagonists.

Acquaintances. Who are the people orbiting your character in their day to day, and in what contexts? Who do they see the most and wish they saw the least, and vice versa, and why can they not course-correct the frequency in a more preferable manner?

Themes

What is this story ABOUT? And why is THIS the best character to explore that?

Spiraling. You character has some kind of goal or belief system at the start of the book that motivates their decisions. Taken to the extreme… what’s the worst possible result of not achieving that goal, or not fulfilling that belief? AKA… the stakes!

You might not have all the answers right away, and that’s ok! Characters evolve as you get into freaky little situations with them, but you need to have a sense of their essence before you can start plotting, and then that plotting can inform their essence right back. But having a character interview template that gets to the heart of how your character was formed pre-novel and what motivates their decision-making in the present will only deepen your relationship to them, give you prompts to explore when you’re blocked, and ensure that they’re well-rounded and containing of multitudes.

Get the complete fillable character interview template. Or become a paid subscriber to our Substack and all of our templates are included – past and future.

“Read” this post as a YouTube video instead, if you’re so inclined!

Bri CastelliniApril 2, 2026

Character-Driven Novel Structure

I struggled with theme for a long time. I just wanted to torture fake people with wild scenarios and then make them kiss. What do you MEAN I need a point for the suffering beyond that I’m a sick freak?

Well, it turns out that I’m still a sick freak… for thematic and character-driven structure. It’s incredibly satisfying (and makes far more sense to my particular creative brain) when I can align the point of my story to the very skeleton that supports it, therefore making character arcs more intuitive and meaningful.

While Kelly’s (and Shakespeare’s) 5-Act-Structure makes a lot of sense now that she’s put it into words for me, and I definitely follow that version of structuring a book when the spirit moves me, my favorite way to outline a novel is with theme and character at the center.

Example: paranormal romance about grief

On a macro level, this manuscript follows every other phase of grief: Denial, Bargaining, and Acceptance.

What does this look like? Instead of trying to align conflict, rising action, twists, etc to a particular page count or percentage of the whole, I let the characters guide pacing along the thematic skeleton. That means I emotionally segment the book by where the character is (and how the plot reacts) along her journey through the stages of grief. Her “refusing the call” in Hero’s Journey parlance lines up with the Denial phase of the book… and her romantic counterpart’s inability to change gears to convince her to work with him.

Bargaining takes up the largest portion of the book, because Anger and Depression are mixed up in it- essentially, the grieving characters are bargaining how much of their decision-making is going to be led by anger or depression, but no concrete decisions are being made. A lot of learning and compromising happens in this portion of the book.

Finally, Acceptance. Not simply acceptance of the end of the Bargaining phase… but first one character, then the other, making a concrete decision about how they will show up in their own life, and the lives of those they love, as a result of all they’ve figured out in the previous act. At first, these Acceptances don’t align… but because it’s a genre romance, eventually, they get there.

These three phases don’t cut the book neatly into thirds, or a Three Act Structure, but it’s far more intuitive for outlining a character-driven story. It centers their experience and their wounds, and ensures that as I work out what’s literally happening in their world, the challenges the characters face should align thematically with what phase we’re in.

I find this much more descriptive and emotionally motivated than “something must change for your characters or they must make a very scary decision.” With a character-driven structure like this, we’re narrowing down what “something” means, and what kinds of “scary decisions” will be most narratively satisfying.

Example: contemporary romance about fame

On a macro level, this manuscript uses deeper and deeper levels of Dante’s Inferno to align the story beats to. Because, you see, hell is other people (hehe). Also, because to be constantly perceived yet consistently misunderstood is also hell, especially when people attempt to simplify your humanity down to sins they can judge you for and feel superior to.

To be clear- I was not by any means adapting Dante’s Inferno when I used some of his little circles of hell as thematic structure for a romance novel about two actors, but I was taking inspiration from his descent to help provide scaffolding for their emotional journey together because it felt apt.

What does this look like? A contemporary romance is generally 65-90k words, and that really isn’t enough time to explore every circle of hell, nor did this story need that. The rings I chose were Limbo, Lust, Greed, Treachery & Fraud, and Dis (“the only way out is through [Satan’s genitals]”).

Limbo finds our actors each at a crossroads of their career, with new directions in mind but plenty of reasons to stay exactly where they are… that is, until they meet each other.

Lust being so early in Dante’s journey at first frustrated me, because my characters weren’t ready to bang it out yet… but I realized it gave me an opportunity to explore a different interpretation of this circle. So by the time they’re in Lust… they’re attracted to each other, but more so covetous of what they perceive the other person represents. Their lust dehumanises the other to an extent, not just sexually, but overall, which sets the stage for…

Greed. This is the portion of the book where they’re actually finally intimate, and because of their covetousness in Lust, they’re gluttons for one another… but only through the lens of the preconceived notions that locked into place in the previous section. The heroine starts to believe she can have it all, and so does the hero… except one of them thinks it’s possible to do so out of the public’s eye, without considering how that would feel to their partner, who’s ready to finally come out of the shadows.

Treachery & Fraud represents, as you might imagine, our characters’ dark night of the soul, where preconceived notions are challenged and our characters choose to either betray the other or themselves instead of being vulnerable and relying on their partnership to see them through the journey.

Dis is the center of Hell according to Dante, where Satan is imprisoned and a whole bunch of other weird stuff, but ultimately the only way out of the Underworld is through… which for our characters means facing what they’ve been afraid to, together.

A word of caution/a diagnostic tool: when you come upon a narrative crossroads (for character or plot), look to where the chapter falls in your thematic outline. If the current phase doesn’t feel resolved, use that as your guide for what kinds of decisions will feel impactful. If the current phase the chapter’s in does feel resolved, or your characters are feeling antsy, consider moving on to what’s next.

Whether you stay in the section you’re starting at, or jump forward, that decision has answers for where the character themselves is, emotionally.

Other existing arc structures you might try out:

The Trials of Heracles
The Fool’s Journey in Tarot
Erikson’s Stages of Psychosocial Development
AA’s 12 Step Program
The Artist’s Way
Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs
The lifecycle of a star

Join us for Writing Community Hour over on The Rogue MFA YouTube channel (which meets every other Thursday evening at 4pm PST/ 7pm EST). It’s a great place to discuss your structure challenges. We host on our YouTube channel, where we’ll be building routine and community with YOU. Subscribe to get notified, and if you’re even a little bit interested, please fill out our quick survey so we can expand these in the future with you in mind.