By Jordan E. Rosenfeld
In the realm of fiction, it’s easy to forget that characters are people too. Put another way, when I was in my graduate writing program, the tough and lovely author, Elizabeth Cox, who sat in on three of my four semesters’ writing workshops, always had this to say: Are your characters real to you? Because if they’re not, they won’t be real to the reader either.
I pondered that a lot. What does it mean for a character to be real to you? After much thought, and lots of editing and writing, I came to these conclusions:
Characters on the brain
You must worry about your characters when you aren’t writing them. Like a good sister or best friend or buddy, if you aren’t thinking about your characters off the page—how their job is holding up, why they’ve hooked up with that jerk again, when they’re going to have that questionable mole looked at by a doctor—then they probably are still only one-dimensional in the realm of your novel.
Know it all
Know more about your character than you reveal on the page. One of the worst ways to develop characters is through back-story—large chunks of summary that fill in everything from the weather on the day your character is born, to the awards they won in high school. That bores readers. But knowing their deepest fears, secrets, past events, missed opportunities and more allows you to build in nuance and subtext that can be played up in your story, through dialogue, behaviors, interactions and more.
Voice
Give your character a distinct, slightly stylized, unusual “voice”—a combination of how they speak, and how they think. Don’t cookie-cutter your characters so that they all speak the same. Think about rhythm and cadence and socio-economic status and word usage and setting and dialect. Read authors who write voice vividly to motivate you (Toni Morrison, Truman Capote, Junot Diaz).
Under Pressure
You develop characters by testing them, torturing them and putting them under pressure. When revising a novel, find out if you’ve put your characters in enough danger/conflict. If too much of a good thing is happening to them, then they’re probably not having enough opportunity for change. Characters show their true colors under duress. Force phobic characters to interact with people who bring up their phobias; put loud, narcissists through humbling transformations; take away love, possessions and hopes from underdogs to create concern and care in the reader (and then give them something even better later on).
Change ‘em up
If your character is the same at the end of your novel as she was at the beginning, there has been no development. The key to character development is to start your character in an unfinished place—something about his life, his self, his family, his soul, his spirit and so on must be incomplete or unsatisfied or in question. By the end of your novel, there will be shifts toward wholeness, understanding, completion, even if he’s not all the way there. Or else maybe you will write a novel in which a person with a seemingly perfect life finds themselves in a “destabilized” but more productive life. Either way, change must come by the end, and it must happen as a result of consequences along the way.
Stay in Scene
Make sure your characters demonstrate their flaws and foibles, quirks and virtues in scenes. Don’t tell us someone is kind—show an act of kindness. Don’t hint that a character has a tick—let them act it out in all its crazy glory. The more you can let your characters speak for themselves in scenes, the more likely they are to be real to your reader.
Jordan Rosenfeld is author of Make a Scene: Crafting a Powerful Story One Scene at a Time (Writer’s Digest Books) and, with Rebecca Lawton, Write Free: Attracting the Creative Life (BeijaFlor Books). She is teaching a series of online classes. Her Mini-series of 1 week writing workshops starts in October. “Method Writing; Finish What you Start; and Learn to Layer Scene Types.” Or the popular “Fiction’s Magic Ingredient” in November. Also visit her Write Free blog for creativity tips.
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Love this post!
Characters are the most important part of what I do as a writer. When I was growing up I had invisible friends, and I wrote stories about them. I still treat characters as real, talk about them as real people. They’ve grown drastically as I put them through hell, but it’s so crucial to have real, deep people you can engage with.
One trick I use and I’ve recommended with clients is to play with characters and just watch them in unusual environments you’re never actually going to use in the story. Take them shopping, to bars, anywhere really. I also make up scenes that never get into the final draft of books. The more you know them, the more real they are.
This is a great post! Character development is definitely something I’ve always had a difficult time with. This article helped me see exactly why my characters are one-dimensional. Now I know what I need to do to make them come alive.
Great post!
Great advice/reminders. It’s easier to make characters vibrant and real when they’re based on a conglomeration of people close to you.
I don’t “make” my characters, at least not consciously. They simply are. I agree that the more real they are to the writer, the more real they are to the reader. The point at which I know my characters have achieved that is when I dream about them. lol
This was really useful, thank you.
I’ve started to write a monologue for (even minor) characters, so that they can talk about themselves. The monologues aren’t included in the final story but they do provide me with an insight into the character of the character, as it were.
kim
Great points here, folks. Joey, I love your trick of putting your characters into other environments outside the novel or story. I recommend this, too! Sometimes we lose track of our characters when we stay in the story.
And Jr…you are one of the lucky ones whose characters simply “appear” mostly formed…I admire you folks :)
Thanks all of you for reading! (And thanks, Maria, as always for letting me babble on here).
“You must worry about your characters when you aren’t writing them.”
So true. If I can’t imagine them washing the dishes or wonder what they might be having for lunch then they have not gotten under my skin enough to be real. When I’m in the grove I always wonder what the off-stage characters are up to. It never shows up for the reader, but provides context for me as a writer.
Great post, Jordan. Thanks.
~jon
Thanks for a great post. I particularly like the point about putting characters “under pressure.” So true–works every time. Also check out my recent post on A Set of Approaches To Character on Kim’s Craft Blog.
This post was so timely. At my writers group last night we had a lengthy discussion about character, particularly as it related to one member’s piece. This post went to the heart of the matter we were discussin in the section “Know it all.” I forwarded a link to this post to entire group. Thanks
I believe the character is at the heart of all writing. That’s who the audience is going reach out and connect to; they want to share the journey of the character, they want to feel what the character is going through, rightly or wrongly. I know that’s what I want when I read, so I make a double effort with my characters when I write.
I found another thing that gives characters depth is not only details, but a special type of detail: a “quirk”, if you will. Does a character have a bottomless pit for a stomach? Have a person who’s new find that out and react to it, like having them squeam or stare blankly and make the eater get uncomfortable. Or, does the character have a dark secret? Make events happen that would allow the person to eventually figure it out, or alternately, have an event that spells it out for them. Say, one character is actually a supercomputer android from an obscured collective organization (er, think Borg without the equipment), but the main character (or maybe have a close friend realize it when the main character does it) finds out only when another party comes searching for the android. Quirks= very helpful for character development.