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Creating Compelling Characters
by
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Louisa
Burton
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Fiction
writers play God in many ways, not the least of which is the creation of human
beings to people our stories. Our characters’ personalities, goals, and
motivations are extraordinarily important because of the intimate way in which
plot and character are linked in a well-thought-out work of fiction. Change
some aspect of a major character, and it will—or should—force a change in the
story. Imagine the repercussions, had Margaret Mitchell decided, halfway through
writing Gone With the Wind, that
Scarlett O’Hara wasn’t sympathetic enough and needed to be less of a spoiled
brat. The plot of that book turns on its flawed protagonist’s sense of
self-entitlement. Take that away, and it’s a completely different story.
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When
you start to get a bead on the characters who populate your fictional world,
there’s a certain amount of information about them that you’re going to want to
develop and—especially if you’re the planning type—put into writing.
Documenting this information in the form of bios, interviews, and the like, will
organize your thoughts and force you to spend time getting to know these
people, to become familiar with their backgrounds and what made them the way
they are. This applies to your protagonist and any other significant
characters, such as your antagonist. Secondary characters can get a more
cursory treatment, but should still be three-dimensional and unique, not just
“types” from central casting.
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For
each major character, you want to determine at some point:
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●Their names and ages, of course
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Their physical descriptions. Even if
you don’t plan to describe them in detail, you, as the author of their world,
should be able to picture them in your mind. Like many writers, especially
those who are visually oriented, I “cast” my books using photographs from
magazines and catalogues. As I’m writing, I keep looking at those pictures,
which helps me to think and feel and talk like my characters.
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Their dominant traits, such as
Scarlett’s self-entitlement, and tags, or descriptors for them—for example, a
gesture or phrase that the character uses frequently.
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Their secondary characteristics,
like the survivor attitude that’s the flip side of Scarlett’s me-me-me
obsession.
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Their flaws, which they might or
might not overcome, depending on the type of story you’re writing.
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Their interests, occupations, and
preoccupations, their feelings about themselves, their sexual experience,
their relationships with others, etc.
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Their character arc; in other words,
how they’ll change, for better or for worse, during the course of the story.
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Their goals. This is a big one.
Multidimensional characters have both acknowledged and unacknowledged goals. The
most pivotal goal is the unacknowledged one, and if the two goals contradict—ie.
what your character thinks he wants is the opposite of what he really wants—it
can establish a gripping resonance within the story. This dynamic is at the
heart of the film Casablanca, which
Robert McKee brilliantly deconstructs in his Story seminars. On the surface, Humphrey Bogart’s Rick Blaine craves isolation,
but what he really wants is the renewal of the love and sense of honor and
purpose that he felt back in Paris, with Ilsa.
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Think
about how far your character will go to achieve his goal, the sacrifices he
would make, the difficulties he would endure. Consider also why he ended up
with that goal in the first place. Motivation is an essential element of
character-driven fiction, in which the characters make the decisions and
choices that move the story forward. Things don’t just happen to them. They make things happen. Why do
your characters make those particular decisions? Why do they do the things they
do? There must always be a good reason. Establish this reason and make it
credible.
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As
Chapter One opens, your characters are doing what they do because of backstory
that happened before the events you’re unfolding. Over time, they’ll experience
things that will motivate them to do other things, a process that produces a
sense of natural evolution within your story.
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In
the beginning of your story and as you move along, remember the concept of
motivational foreshadowing. The things your characters do and think early on can
hint at their future actions; decisions they make can come back to haunt or
help them.
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The
all-important Show, Don’t Tell
concept applies to character development on the page, as to everything else in
fiction. If you know your characters really well, you can have them play out
their personality quirks rather than just cataloguing them for your reader; the
former is a much more powerful and effective approach. In his book On Writing, Stephen King describes how
he fleshed out Annie Wilkes, the nurse who holds Paul Sheldon prisoner in Misery: “We see her go through dangerous mood-swings, but I tried never to come
right out and say ‘Annie was depressed and possibly suicidal that day’ or ‘Annie
seemed particularly happy that day.’ If I have to tell you, I lose. If, on the
other hand, I can show you a silent, dirty-haired woman who compulsively
gobbles cake and candy, then have you draw the conclusion that Annie is in the
depressive part of a manic-depressive cycle, I win.”
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Knowing
your characters well will also help you to write dialogue for them that sounds
not only natural, but unique to their particular personalities. The more real
they are to you, the easier it is to just listen in on their conversations and
transcribe what they’re saying word for word.
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Protagonists are the characters with whom
your reader will most closely identify. They’re the tour guides for the
emotional journey that is your story. Therefore, whether you’re writing classic
heroic fiction (which encompasses much commercial fiction, such as SF, fantasy,
suspense, and romance) or non-heroic, naturalist fiction, it is imperative to
make your reader empathize with your protagonist or protagonists. Make us feel
their pain, their joy, their embarrassment, their struggles, their triumph. A
non-heroic protagonist may have a fatal weakness, something he can’t overcome
during the course of the story, but we must still be able to crawl into his
skin and see the world through his eyes.
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If
you’re writing heroic fiction, your protagonist will be inherently virtuous and
strong, despite his flaws—flaws that he may very well overcome by the end of
the story. For example, like Bogie in Casablanca,
he may start out consumed by self-interest, only to gravitate toward
selflessness as the story evolves. In my opinion, the most intriguing kind of
hero or heroine is an extraordinary person with a flaw.
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Antagonists, assuming they’re human (they
often aren’t; for example, a coma was the “villain” in Elizabeth Berg’s Range of Motion) should be worthy
adversaries; how satisfying is it to watch your hero vanquish a foe who comes
off as a wuss? They should also be as
fully developed as the protagonists they’re battling, not one-dimensional bad
guys. Villains are often driven by self-interest, but even so, give them
believable motivation for doing things that may seem wrong or even evil. Mario
Puzo’s The Godfather was the first
novel I know of in which Mafioso were treated as real human beings, with
convincing, even sympathetic reasons for participating in organized crime. Puzo’s
vision spawned one of the most gripping fictional worlds in modern literature
and cinema.
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Keep
in mind that your antagonist’s actions, no matter how appalling, make sense to
him. Try not to fall back on mental illness to excuse what he does because it
seems easier than coming up with credible motivation. Even psychopaths operate
according to a certain logic. If you want to go that route, research the
particular syndrome you’ve saddled your character with.
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Secondary characters should be critical to the story.
If not, weed them out, no matter how much you love them. There’s no room in
even the most epic novel for filler of any kind, and that includes people who
don’t serve a real function in the unfolding of the story.
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There
are two really essential points to take away from this article:
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First,
always remember that your characters’ decisions—not yours—are what drive the
story. The crisis, that moment when the drama peaks, is usually precipitated by
something a major character took it into his head to do. In a coming of age
story, this ultimate turning point may occur after the protagonist makes a
difficult decision to do something he’s never done before, to take a maturing
leap. In a romance, this is often an emotional resolution: “I love her, I can’t
lose her.” In a thriller, the protagonist takes the steps necessary to defeat
the villain, often at great peril to himself.
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Second,
and most importantly, make your protagonist empathetic. We needn’t sympathize
with him—he could be, say, a hit man—but we must
(a word I almost never use in articles about writing) be able to identify
deeply with him. Readers can overlook or forgive all kinds of flaws in the
novels they read—contrivances, coincidences, awkward writing, plot holes—if
they’re deeply enough invested in the central character. His goal becomes their
goal, his motivation their motivation, his emotions their emotions. If you can
keep someone turning the pages just to find out what happens to this person,
you’ll have done your job as a storyteller, and then some.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons
Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.
Copyright © 2007, Louisa
Burton aka Patricia Ryan. You're
welcome to post this article on your website or blog provided the
content, including the author’s name, is not altered in any way, and that
this copyright and licensing statement, complete with working links,
appear with the article. Any other use is a violation of U.S. and International
copyright law. For permission to use the article in other ways, please email me. Thanks.
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