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Creating believable and resonant characters is one of the great challenges of the fiction author.
Imagine the following scene:
A woman shops in a grocery store at 10 am dressed in evening wear: a cocktail dress, bolero jacket, opera gloves, a string of pearls, patent leather pumps. Her makeup is subtle and tastefully done, her hair neatly combed.
She reaches for a can of peaches on a top shelf, straining, unable to get a grip. Glancing around, she sees no one able to offer assistance, stares once more at the unnerving peaches, then suddenly hikes up her skirt, notches the toe of her pump on a lower shelf and starts climbing as though up a rock face.
Tongue between her teeth, reaching as far as she can, she wiggles her fingers, finally nudges one of the cans — it totters. Then falls. Several others tumble down with it. She jumps back down, shields her head from the avalanche — she may be hurt, but before anyone can get to her she very slowly drops to her knees, picks up two of the cans, clutches them to her chest, and begins to sob quietly.
There is no description of what this woman looks like beyond what she’s wearing. We presume she’s short, but her age, race, weight, height and so on are all unstated. But it’s unlikely anyone who reads the previous paragraph will not form a distinct mental image of her.
What are the most important things that make that visualization and engagement possible — that make the depiction compelling?
- The character needs or wants something.
- She is having difficulty getting what she needs or wants, and comes up with a plan — imperfect, admittedly (one might say necessarily) — for overcoming that difficulty.
- She exhibits a seeming contradiction: she’s dressed in evening wear at the grocery store at mid-morning.
- Something unexpected happens (she makes a mistake), which renders her vulnerable. (She may even be hurt, enhancing this impression.)
- Her sobbing suggests there is more to her predicament than meets the eye — a secret.
More than any of the other considerations, these five concerns are key to any compelling character.
That doesn’t mean we’ve uncovered the secret crazy magic formula, or that by methodically running down this checklist we can do all that’s required to make a character leap off the page. Characters can’t be crafted from a grab bag of traits, no matter how clever or interesting. That’s a recipe for an idea — a plot puppet — not a character.
Characterization requires a constant back-and-forth between the exterior events of the story and the inner life of the character. This requires training your insight, asking the right questions and not hedging on the answers, and learning to listen to yourself when, from the back of your mind, a voice insists: No. Not yet. Make it better.
That said, these five considerations can provide a touchstone as you work. Either while conceiving the character, writing the initial drafts, or polishing a later edit, as you’re evaluating the character you may ask yourself if any of these five qualities is missing, or underdeveloped.
If so, consider providing such a trait, or bringing one already in existence into greater focus, to see if it resonates with the story, echoes other aspects of the characterization you’ve already developed, helps clarify or intensify interactions or conflicts with other characters. or in some other way enhances your depiction.
The reasons that these five specific concerns are so central goes to the heart of who we are as human beings:
- The most profound actions we take reveal an inner yearning, a desire for meaning in the face of death.
- Our true character is never revealed so nakedly as when our desires are thwarted, and we need to adapt, improvise, get creative, dig deeper within ourselves for greater resolve or deeper insight. One might even say our character is forged at such times.
- We instinctively respond to vulnerability. Few things engage our empathy as automatically as a wound — including invisible ones, like sorrow, loss, and regret.
- Contradictions reveal that we’re more than we seem, or care to admit. Our public self gets betrayed by our private self. Pieces don’t fit. We must be many things to many people. (Or, as Jean Cocteau put it: “The spirit of creation is the spirit of contradiction — the breakthrough of appearances toward an unknown reality.”)
- And secrets get at the difficult truths of guilt and shame in a life lived among others. On some level, we all believe ironically that we must hide something of ourselves to make ourselves visible. No one would accept us, let alone love us, if they knew the whole truth.
These aspects of character can’t be cranked out mechanically. A rushed approach to anything will bear only scattered results. To paraphrase one of my favorite professors: The difference between great artists, and artists who are not so great, is that great artists think deeply about simple things.
And so in our writing, we should strive to think deeply about five rather simple things:
- the nature and quality of yearning
- how profoundly frustration of one’s desires distorts the personality — or defines it
- what it means to be wounded
- the curse and crutch of secrets
- the inescapability of contradiction
From that foundation we can move on to exploration of the physical, psychological, and sociological elaborations that flesh out the character, render her and the world she inhabits more real.
But at every stage, it remains important to resist the seeming reassurance of checklists and easy answers, and instead to be patient, to seek solitude and quiet, the better to think deeply and to respect the mysterious gravity that resides in the seemingly simple.
Do you have any tips or questions about writing believable characters? Please do leave your thoughts in the comments below.
His latest book, The Art of Characteris the ultimate guide to creating captivating characters. David has taught at the UCLA Extension Writers' Program, 826 Valencia, Chuck Palahniuk's LitReactor, the San Francisco Writers' Grotto and at numerous writing conferences across the U.S.
Top image: BigStockPhoto.com paintbrushes and palette
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1 2 3 Next »For me, characters are all about conflict. Conflict with themselves and conflict with eachother. I really try to get into the heads of my characters and figure out what they want out of life. Either they've already got something and could lose it or they're striving for something that always seems to be just out of reach. I think a characters appearance should be relevant to the scene. I might give a brief description of a character but I won't spend three paragraphs talking about them unless the character or the scene they're in is important.
To use the grocery store example above, let us suppose our protagonist gets her peaches and is standing in line at the cash register. Unless there is conflict with the other customers I won't mention anyone waiting in line with her. When she gets to the cash register I might describe the cashier, maybe have the cashier be a stark contrast to the protagonist and have her dwell on this.
Okay I'll get off my soap box now. I could talk about the complexity of characters for hours. Thanks for the post Joanna and sorry for the blog-post of a comment. I'll try to keep it short in the future. ;)
Thanks Joanna for sharing it. This is my weak point, I'm "too kind" to my characters, I need to learn to go rough on them for the sake of a compelling story.
Thanks Joanna and David. I've been reading a lot on creating compelling characters and I think your example is really great. I grasped the contradictions and what made everything work. I am now thinking how this can be applied to a few of my characters...
Great post! I have struggled for years to find unique but believable ways to introduce characters and to continue to keep them that way, but to add new layers of complexity and what the film business often calls "dramatic need". William Goldman's writings about character development are often just as useful for novelists as for screenwriters.
Your description of the women, however, reminded me of one my weaknesses: I often forget to describe characters! One thing I cannot stand in novels is an overly elaborate description of the character's physical traits; it usually bores me, because I want to get inside the person's head as soon as possible. Being a kind of misanthrope, with little interest in mundane details, I tend only to focus on those traits that stand out as odd or intriguing. This woman, for instance, made me think of the character of Susan in the film "Desperately Seeking Susan"--Bohemian, New Wave and creative...until she began sobbing! Susan would never do that. She would probably shrug and walk out.
So, in a recent short story I started, I forced myself to describe two characters, both mail carriers, as uniquely as I could, but with an emphasis on the idea that the main character who sees them is like most of us: we don't usually "check out" the appearance of our mailmen (or women). Because the mail carriers both bring something unique and possibly dangerous into the main character's life, she considers them more carefully. It was very difficult to write about these guys! One was old, about to retire, with a Leprechaun-like appearance (short, wiry red hair, starling blue eyes and an energetic, happy manor). To write about someone so extreme-looking was difficult because I was tempted to use extreme words, and allowed only "Leprechaun" to remain after editing.
The other, new carrier was strangely easy to describe, since he is average-looking, young, physically fit but not musclebound and has a pleasant but rather vacant air about him. This fairly boring man's appearance is what catches the eye of the main character. He seems TOO mundane and "safe"! Writing about him was fun, like describing an apple or a log. I had the challenge of making him look "normal" but possess a scintilla of danger running just beneath his surface.
So...that is one way that I try to conquer my dislike of describing physical appearance. The other ways I have found successful are to introduce details piece by piece or to combine them with some action, or as seen through the eyes of another person, often with judgment and suspicion, or even approval (which is less fun!).
I'm going to try this again, to see if I can get out of moderation limbo:
First, Thanks to Joanna for inviting me here to say a few words and share this forum with each of you.
Steven: The relationship between character and conflict is inherent in all of the qualities I discussed. You state it well: Desire creates conflict (because the world is not designed to gratify our desires). That’s why how the character responds to frustration of her desire is so central—it’s how she responds to the conflict inherent in wanting something. Vulnerability is just the woundedness that comes from having wanted something and suffered for it. Contradictions and secrets help depict the conflict between who we might want to be and who we feel we must be among others.
As for physical description, I always try to focus on how the character’s appearance affects her interactions with others. Description for description’s sake seldom interests me—how we look (or how we think we look) is a mode of interaction.
In this scene, the others in the checkout line, including the cashier, would be of interest solely (perhaps) in fleshing out why this woman is dressed so curiously.
Gyula: You’re not alone in being too kind to your characters. It’s a common writer problem—because writers are often by nature reflective, introverted, outwardly gentle and even cautious people. But as Stephen says, character is conflict, and only by putting your characters through the gauntlet can you and the reader gain a genuine understanding of their essence.
Thanks, heather, I'm glad the post was useful.
Hey David, thanks for the feedback. You comment about 'putting your characters through the gauntlet' was perfect. That's exactly what I do. It's not done out of sadism but the realization that I want the world I'm creating for my readers to feel real. In real life people don't always have a happy ending or get something because they rub a magic lamp. Nothing irritates me more than when I'm reading a novel or watching a movie and the protagonist(or someone else), seems to accomplish the impossible just because the plot needs them to. I don't have a problem with characters overcoming challenges but it should happen as a result of personal growth or struggle not as the result of a plot convenience.
Anyway. Thanks for responding and I hope Joanna has you post again.
Thanks, Steven. As one often hears in writer workshops: Act 2 is otherwise known as Torture the Protagonist. Not out of sadism, as you point out. Rather, stories are about change, and we all resist change. Only by facing repeated failure and frustration do we get it: Somethin's gotta give.
What I look for as both writer and reader are characters that do not rely on formulas and clichés in their development. When I find myself relying on precedents from my reading as I create a character--or see this in something I'm reading--I become skeptical and take stock. It's a symptom of laziness, a failure of imagination. And this applies as well to dialogue. Boilerplate, derivative speeches are the kiss of death.
Thanks for the great tips. For my characters, I try to write them so that the reader is aware of their motivation and the rationale behind it, but the character isn't. A lot of times my characters aren't sure exactly of why they want something or how to get it, which leads to a lot of room for twists and turns, as well as lots of character development over the course of the story.
Character starts with a name. I have to name my characters. I just sent a submission of a historical romance and when I was trying to plot the heroine, I saw a bottle of creamy Italian salad dressing so I thought of Italiana and then it became Liana because the character lied at the opening scene but the more I thought of it while writing, why not just Ana. But the process helped me in developing the scenes and character. The names are important to get me in writing the story. My fictional American president in my political action suspense thriller novels is Calvin Woodrow. My too favorite American presidents based on historical accounts are Calvin Coolidge and Woodrow Wilson, because of business instead of politics. I decided to create the same president in various novels. He promotes market economy as a way of improving the American economy and global economy. Knowing the two presidents keeps me reminded of the political theory I need to include in my novels. Nothing published; the novels are going through the traditional gauntlets and I have several WIPs with the same president. But I am glad that I am learning the self-pub route.
Susan: Goldman’s an excellent guide for writers regardless of form, and “dramatic need” is another way of saying “yearning,” the term Robert Olen Butler uses, and the one I prefer. “Dramatic need” sounds a bit like jargon to my ear, whereas “yearning” returns us to something human, and characters lacking humanity quickly devolve into plot puppets, no matter how ‘dramatic” their “need.”
The key to the woman’s sobbing is that it does not relate to the present situation. The present situation has triggered a deeper sense of futility—the source of which as yet remains a secret.
You tap into a key point in recounting your stated aversion to description—which nonetheless you think about quite well. Describing the character serves two purposes. One is providing the reader a visual image that anchors the character in their imaginations. I agree with you: Here, less is definitely more. The other, subtler, and to my mind more important purpose is to convey how the character’s appearance affects his or her interactions with others—arouses suspicion or relief or discomfort or attraction, etc.
Barry: Agreed. The devil is always on the details and there are times you simply have to keep digging, changing, revising to get to something still true to the scene but uniquely, freshly stated.
ED: Your technique is known as dramatic irony, where the reader is aware of what the character isn’t. And a great many excellent stories reveal the character only discovering their true motives or ambitions as the conflict strips away their delusions, artifices, denials, confusions, etc. In fact some writing guides consider this essential: That there’s no real drama if the character is fully self-aware from the start. In that case, the only suspense that’s created is through answering the question: Will he get what he wants (rather than also: How does he come to understand what he wants)? But sometimes it’s helpful to leave the reader in the dark as well. Otherwise both you and the reader have a position of superiority over the character that can inadvertently diminish him.
Daniel: There’s a section of The Art of Character that specifically deals with the importance of the character’s name. I always try for a sound in the name that for me conjures something essential about the character, or provides at least the hint of an image: Shel Beaudry, Frank Maas, Dennis Murchison, Cassady Montesano, Jordie Skellenger. And yet, ironically, a name is one of the attributes a person has no control over, unless he deliberately chooses to change it. It’s given to him by others, which is usually true of nicknames as well. In this way, names are subtly, curiously social in nature. They attach us to others—our parents, who named us; the people we’re named for (if that’s the case); and the people who nickname us, for better or worse.
Dear David:
Absolutely wonderful piece. Vivid and essential. What I especially liked is how you linked the need or want of a character with the character's most fundamental want: the desire for meaning in the face of death. Thinking through character on this level will help us give our characters and stories greater moral depth.
Also, Aristotle said that action is character. Your article certainly concurs with that statement in showing us a woman who right away is in the midst of an action fraught with conflict. But what's wonderful is how your very cinematic example actually takes us inside, to a small but intriguing extent, her emotional state. It's good to be reminded that emotion is revealed principally and most convincingly by what characters do, not by a lot of narrative "telling" or character monologuing (unless, perhaps, that narrative or monologuing is unreliable or otherwise reveals a lot of interesting subtext).
Thank to you too, Joanna, for inviting David to contribute this. I look forward to sharing this piece today.