Creating Compelling Characters
Last time on The Ingredients we looked at the setting as a starting point for your story. Now let’s look at starting with the drivers of plot: characters.
In this post:
Motivation
Nature versus nurture
Write what you know
Writing diverse characters
Your cast
Motivation
When first developing characters, we often like to think about details like their appearance, background, personal history, relationships, likes, dislikes, et cetera. But characters are greater than the sum of their parts. They also have unique instincts and rationales and ways of comprehending the world. The most important character details that we could possibly come up with are all in service to one of the greatest principles of plotting, motivation.
Here’s a simple rule to follow: when deciding what parts of a character’s backstory to include in your actual story (whether by hinting at it or laying it all out), look to your character’s motivations. Anything worthy of mention should be that which impacts motivation, which in turn makes brainstorming your character fairly straightforward.
Do we need to know their favourite colour? Probably not, unless it’s a clue or impacts the plot in some other way. Should we know about a past trauma that they suffered which impacts their current-day decisions? Absolutely.
I’m sure only a fraction of fiction writers are also psychologists, but we can all tap into some of the principles of psychology. Literary critique is actually one of the few academic fields where psychoanalysis is still a credible and useful theory, for instance. Modern psychology has become more sophisticated than its predecessor in order to meet the needs of real people, but fictional people do not need real treatment. Instead read about them, read into them and reflect on the world around us through them.
Your character can and should still reflect a deep personhood and interiority, even if they aren’t real. It’s what makes characters compelling. We can give them verisimilitude by observing real life thoughts and behaviours, especially our own. In my post on ideas generation, I mentioned that journaling and getting to know yourself well is a good basis for writing—this is why.
Nature versus nurture
In real life, we are usually some combination of nature and nurture. The same could be true of your characters, though I posit that in fiction, nurture tends to be the more interesting side to explore. Think about it: characters are at their most compelling when their strengths, fears, weaknesses and compulsions come from, not necessarily their genetic history, but their own unique experiences and the decisions they make because of them. A character’s nature is still important, and likely important to them—it can certainly contribute to their lived experiences—but how they choose to live their lives is so much more fundamental to their core being.
As writers, it is also our duty to portray characters ethically and responsibly. That means, if you decide to give your character a specific genetic characteristic, it is your duty to conduct thorough research on it and, if it is not a characteristic that you share, consult people who do.
We’ll touch on this more, but for those of us just starting out, giving yourself time to build your skills and learn best practices before tackling something as complex as this is of great benefit. There’s nothing wrong with drawing from your own knowledge and experience.
Write what you know
The phrase “write what you know” often gets brought up in these situations. But what does it actually mean?
As a young writer, I thought it meant limiting my topics to only those in which I was already knowledgeable. But since we’re always learning new things, what we know grows with us. If you are dedicated enough, you can learn almost any topic well enough to portray it in a piece of writing. You can learn about how a certain surgery is done, for instance. Now, I wouldn’t necessarily recommend you go out and try to perform said surgery (unless you also have years of extensive medical training), but you could probably write about a character who specializes in that type of surgery.
Writers specialize in writing. But in order to write about anything well, we have to have a certain amount of knowledge in that topic. And how much knowledge is required can be determined by answering these three questions:
How deep is the portrayal? In other words, how much screen time is the topic getting? Are you showing it in excruciating detail, or is it a passing glance? If the latter, you can probably make do with a quick search. If the former, you’re going to want to know it pretty much inside out.
What is the medium and audience? If you’re writing in a fishing magazine read by professional anglers, they’ll notice if you get the identifying features of a muskellunge wrong.
Would an erroneous or shallow representation harm anyone? This is the big one. If you were to, let’s say, portray a character who comes from a marginalized community, the negative impact of an inauthentic portrayal is obviously much more grievous than in the prior example.
The other factor to keep in mind is this: can what you’re portraying be backed up by concrete, scientific fact, or is it based on lived experience? If it’s the latter, then that doesn’t mean you get to make up whatever you like. It means you need to keep in mind that your portrayal might not always jibe with another person’s idea of it.
It’s worth mentioning that even when writing about scientific fact, we may encounter differing opinions (and advancements in science actually requires this). Due diligence is what’s required to move forward here.
Part of that due diligence may be to consult those who are intimately familiar with the topic. If you’re trying to be accurate about the science in your science fiction story, you may want to work with a science consultant. One of my favourite Toronto-based shows, Orphan Black, did that very thing. A writer’s duty isn’t necessarily to bear all knowledge for all pieces of writing, it’s to ensure the soundness of the information they communicate.
Of course, there are things that we do know. Most authors probably have a very good idea of what it is to be a person, so we can draw on that—our thoughts, feelings and experiences—to shape our characters.
Even if we haven’t experienced everything we put our characters through (and we certainly put them through a lot, don’t we?), we have one crucial tool to fall back on in order to make sense of it all: empathy.
Writing diverse characters
I am a firm believer that diversity is a strength, whether it’s in the real world we live in or in the fictional ones we escape to.
Your characters don’t all need to look a certain way or have similar past experiences. In fact, this can be a weakness in writing. If a group of characters all have the same speech pattern, for instance, they tend to blend together.
In fiction, we may lend certain characteristics of ourselves to our characters, but they are not one-to-one reflections of us. Naturally, that means our characters will look different and behave differently from us. Regardless of who a character is, the one thing they must all do is be authentic. Otherwise, they come across as caricature or simply flat.
Again, speak to people with a similar background or experiences to the characters you want to portray. They should never be carbon copies of a person—in fact, that could see you in serious legal trouble (which we’ll discuss in a later post)—but hearing someone’s reflections on their experiences can help enrich the voices of your characters.
But before you jump to that step, stop and consider what story you’re telling and why. Say, for instance, that your character goes on a pilgrimage that is a real religious practice today. Do you observe this religion yourself? If the answer is no, I encourage you to stop and examine why you wish to tell that story, or better yet, why you should be the one to tell it. If the mention of the practice is fleeting, it may be appropriate for you to use, but a whole story centred on this practice will always be more relevant and meaningful when told by someone who actually observes that religion.
Writing characters who feel real and complex requires us to be exceedingly aware of the impact that those portrayals have. It also means that we must keep in mind our own biases. We all have them, but taking time to consider and question our predispositions serves us as both writers and people.
This specific topic is complex and deserving of further discussion, but let us consider this thought before we move forward for now: though characters themselves may sometimes act undignified or be disrespectful, you as the author must always portray them with respect and dignity.
Your cast
Now, let’s look at your whole cast of characters.
The protagonist
At the forefront of your story is your protagonist. Sometimes the role is shared between people, but we’ll stick to one for simplicity here. Your protagonist is usually the point of reference for your audience when they enter the world of your story. Not every protagonist is a fish-out-of-water just learning the ropes, but they are the person we follow most closely. The story centres them, though they are not required to be cut from any particular moral cloth.
You should spend most of your time developing this character, learning all of their quirks and secrets. You don’t have to tip your hand to us with all of the nitty-gritty details, but we should have a strong sense of who the person is before they go on a life-changing journey.
The main characters
Your protagonist is, of course, a main character, but they aren’t typically the only one.
The protagonist usually has relationships with other people who feature in the story. They might have a confidante, a mentor, a love interest, a rival, a big bad—all kinds of people they will meet along the way. None of these archetypes is essential to a story, but usually one or more of them is there to prop up and support the framework around your main character. Superman wouldn’t be the same if he didn’t have Lois Lane or Lex Luthor.
These characters are important to your protagonist, so they’re important to us. Spend a bit of time rendering them beyond just the broad strokes. You might not need as much depth as you do for your protagonist, but you should know their motivations. We might even get their perspective throughout the story too, so we’ll need to connect to them in some way.
The rest
And now we come to the other characters. This is everyone from named supporting characters to the nameless rabble that inhabits the world.
These characters are still important—they certainly ought to be if they’re taking up precious manuscript space—but they are easier to render, largely because their time on the page tends to be brief. We likely won’t see from their perspective, and they don’t usually have a deep bond with the protagonist. If you’re a barista, the customers whose orders you fill do play a role in your life, as you do in theirs. It’s just not usually one that necessitates learning their life story.
Since your audience is more removed from them, you can fill out these characters in a few bullet points. What they do in relation to the main cast and what they want in a broad sense is more important than knowing precisely what led them to this moment.
Your characters are some of the most crucial ingredients of your story. Their decisions and interactions are what drive the plot in most cases. Create them with love and attention and they will reward you with fertile ground for your story.
Mary Kehoe provides structural, stylistic and copy editing services for a variety of written works through her agency, Elixir Editorial. From time to time she dabbles in her own writing projects which tend toward the speculative genre.
She is a member of both Editors Canada and the Chartered Institute of Editing and Proofreading (CIEP), as well as a founding member and former chair of the Toronto Arts & Letters Club writing group. A longtime lover of the English language, Mary is passionate about supporting writers on the journey to inspire the world.
