Most writers I’ve encountered are either character builders, world builders, or plotters. And while a good short story or novel needs a mix of all three, the area where most folks seem to struggle is characterization.
If you’re a world builder, you’re in good company: Tolkien and Herbert were excellent world builders. After all, who cannot picture in his own mind the depressing, fog-enshrouded wastes of the Dead Marshes or the blasted sandscapes of Dune?
If you’re a plotter, you have only to turn to Asimov’s Foundation series to find the intricate palace intrigue and subterfuge necessary to circumvent the all-encompassing, all-seeing empire of the Mule.
But if, like me, you find yourself admiring the intricacy of carefully crafted worlds and plots from the cold distance, asking yourself why anyone should give a damn, then you’re a character builder. The nice thing about character building is that it’s the non-stereotyping and the avoidance of tropes that makes things interesting. It’s the backstories that make people interesting!
But if you’re not a character builder, here’s what you need to know in order to make sure your characters don’t become chess pieces absent of free will, victims of circumstance, or just another sculpted piece that fits beautifully into your delicately carved filigree of Arboria, the Forest World.
Pick a character, any character
We’re talking as generic as you can get: a basic human being, or at least an alien with whom your readers can identity.
Next, you need a reason that he or she in particular was chosen at this moment for this job. Is it because of the character’s past experience working on a mining colony during a viral outbreak? Is it because she was the only flight school officer with dual PhDs in astrophysics and linguistics? Or was she just a victim of circumstance?
Ask yourself how that character got to the point in time just before “the situation” (we’ll get to that in a moment) occurred. Don’t go crazy yet; just get the basics down. All you need is enough to build a structure within which the character’s life unfolds.
Add the situation
Most plotters would probably disagree here, but hang with me for a second. I believe that good stories start with well established characters. But as an old friend of mine once said, “the situation molds the character, and the character molds the plot.”
So yes, situation is important. It’s just not that interesting by itself. Who wants to read a story whose slug line is “The world is ending”? Okay, then how about “Faced with the end of the world, two unlikely lovers find hope amidst the darkness”?
Let’s agree for now that it’s the character in the situation that makes it interesting.
Why, then, do so many stories go south after introducing the situation? My opinion is that it’s because the characters brought into the situation don’t have any backstory. They’re Detective Spiff, hard-edged, boozer and washed-up P.I. looking into what starts as a simple assassination case but turns out to involve deep political intrigue. Who’s Detective Spiff? We don’t know. Everything Spiff does seems to be irrational, impulsive, and unpredictable…most likely because the author is making him up as he goes along.
That’s why, in the end, you have to get to know your characters, not just their backgrounds.
Getting to know your characters
People love to see vulnerability, doubt, and uncertainty in characters. It makes them seem more human and identifiable. It makes their future in the plot less predictable. And it contributes an arc to the story that makes it easier to follow. We know, for instance, that Detective Spiff is slow off the mark to shoot the bad guy because firing too soon was how he lost his partner in a shootout ten years ago. He got himself into the shootout by trusting an informant just a little too much. Now he’s hesitant to lean on anyone but himself, and deep down, he wants to expunge the guilt of letting his partner die while somehow coming to terms with the fact that he’s really gone.
How would you feel if you were Detective Spiff? What would happen in your life if you actually faced his situation, and how could getting into it in the first place even happen?
If you can picture that, you can write from a place of authenticity and your characters will feel human, well-rounded, and sympathetic.
What if I really don’t know my character?
Sometimes getting to know your character means getting to know and sympathize with some really unsavory people. That’s a hard task, and the easiest way to approach it is to imagine yourself in the same situation with the same upbringing and environmental influences.
It also helps your readers identify with the shared sea of emotions we—and all your characters—should share. In fact, the absence of identifiable emotions is often one way most of us spot the “oddballs”: the kind of creeps and psychopaths who would take a cat apart just to see how it works. Unless your character is truly that evil, don’t portray him that way. Portray him his way.
If your character’s a gun-toting yeehaw who lives in a trailer in Northeast Alabama, then you need to get inside his head. You need to know why guns are so important to him, and why he chose the trailer over a house. You need to understand that self-sufficiency, honor, bravery, family and faith are important things. You need to know how many times he’s played by the rules, only to encounter bad results. You need to know just how ground-down and disrespected he feels about the electric-car-driving corporate billionaires who are constantly telling him how deer hunting for food is killing the planet.
I’ll say it again: you need to “go” there. If your characters are zealots, jihadists, tripped-out druggies, rabid feminists, or milquetoast salarymen, you need to know how they got there, what they fear, what they hope for, and what they have come to expect from the world. You don’t have to actually be these people, but you need to learn to portray them with a certain degree of sympathy if you want to play them authentically.
Then your characters will be well-rounded.
Good characters write the story for you
One way you’ll be able to tell if you’re fleshed out your characters fully is if they start to write the story. That same friend who said that the situation molds the character and that characters mold the plot explained to me that they did it by exerting “plot gravity.”
What he meant was that the actions the characters took, when drawn from an authentic personal reaction to the current situation within the context of their individual backgrounds, were mostly informed by their upbringing, and that the consequences of those actions were therefore not just predictable but realistic.
In one of my own stories, a character named Eric Henderson, a mid-level intelligence analyst with some minor supervisory responsibility within the National Reconnaissance Office, finds that he must hold onto a secret he desperately wishes could be let out. As he watches his boss try to maneuver to hide things and cover his own ass, he decides he’s had enough and quits his job, only to be drawn back into parts of it in his new job as a U.N. Science Liaisons Officer charged with not keeping secrets. His history and personal baggage are a very important part of how and why he reacts to subterfuge and why ultimately, and without revenge, he outs his boss and gets on with his life.
Eric’s reactions, behaviors, and the arc of his personal story took the story in a direction I hadn’t planned. I had originally wanted it to be about the overwhelming societal shock of one-sided technology trade during First Contact, but it turned out that the story was really about the tradeoffs people make in their personal lives, and how you can’t go back once you’ve taken a step in a new direction.
I was surprised at the plot gravity that Eric’s banal existence exerted on the story…and pleased. It made it much more interesting and personally compelling. I could feel Eric’s tiredness and his desperate desire to have his life count for something.
Feeling something for Eric made me feel something for the story.
And that, of course, is the whole point of writing.
