More Than a Character

The Way We Talk and What We Say

To give a character depth, writers imagine that the best strategy is to give them a deep, abiding trauma. We use this approach to vitalise them; to enrich and make them memorable. And we suppose, because they've experienced an awful, often staggering event in their lives, we use it to explain the character's motivations. This, we say, is the burden they're carrying; this is the reason they act as they do. We've seen this writing strategy used in hundreds of stories, so we believe in it. We think it works. But it doesn't. Not really.

A character that has suffered upheaval is unquestionably more interesting. As people, we are defined intensely by the bad things that have happened... but what is more important than the upheaval is not what it motivates us to do each day — but how we got past it. How we grew. Meaning is not discovered in the horrible thing itself and its imperative... but in how we've risen above the horrible thing by strength and will, thus redefining ourselves. This makes a far stronger, far more relatable character than those personalities who never seem to get over anything.

We need to question ourselves about every character, not just the ones that have suffered the most. Everyone has; therefore, we should approach our story with the understanding that there are no "weak" characters, just types we see a lot of, and those we see little of. We cannot afford to spend our book pages inserting some fantastic debilitating agony for every Sally Busdriver and every Terry Plumber who happens across the main character's story... yet if we want Sally and Terry to be real people, we need another way of conveying that. Characters are more than their history and their physical traits ... it's about living, breathing persons who congregate together to tell the tale, from the main character to the walk-on. There are no unimportant parts.

Writing our story, we conceive that we need a person for a critical scene. This is an important first step for a writer: don't think of them as "characters." The last thing we want to do with our work is dehumanise the participants. They're people. They have lives, they have thoughts... we may need them to be here at this moment to pull the protagonist from the plot mud that's accumulated, but that doesn't mean they're objects. The reason we objectify them is because we've been taught that personality needs a "backstory." It just isn't so.

Let us conceive of an uncle, childhood friend, neighbour, whomever it has to be that needs to be fleshed out. Normally, as writers, we've been coached to seek a defining characteristic — some look, some visible habit, some outlook — and then slap that on like a shipping label. But this is a pitfall, though we think it's a good idea... for these characteristics are a charade, a card trick, a fakery that supposedly provides flesh to bones, when it's actually a cheap hat and sunglasses on a skeleton. We are not defined by our characteristics, but by our way of reacting and engaging with others. We are complex creatures... with instincts, joys, fears, impatience, ennui and disinterest. We cannot be defined by a quirk.

Alas, we say, what can we do? This character only appears in the book for a few thousand words, they're only there for the dinner scene in chapter eight; and this other character has even less space, just three quarters of a page in chapter four, when he makes a comment as the car is being hoisted from the lake. How are we to give more than a defining characteristic when this is all the time we have?

We interpret people from their choice of words, and the order they put them in. If our one aunt says, "I took a walk by the lake," she's a different person from our other aunt, from the other side of the family, who says, "I done went down by the lake." And they're different still from our older second cousin who says, "I thought when I saw the water at the lake, it looked fine." We can do this all day, making character after character, just by having them say the same thing, with different priorities, cadence and grammar. It's so easy, and it requires no space at all.

We have tone to add, and the shape of hands when they reach out to grasp ours, and things to put on a counter that they're busy with that defines one aunt from another. We have looks that soothe, inspect and tear us asunder. We have tenderness and threatening, and all the grey in-between. And all these things don't parade as characteristics. If our aunt is thoughtful, it is in the support she gives, the hand that claps our shoulder as she walks past, the way she tolerates something we've said that wasn't true when she was our age. We don't need to say in the story, "My aunt was thoughtful." We feel it, we can hear it, we can intuit it. It doesn't need a label.

No matter how little time we have, we can replace "said" with "drawled," "dictated," "directed," "discounted." We want to still use "said," because the reader finds it invisible, and most times, we don't want to step on the sentence's message with a big hanging word that the sentence already makes clear; but if the sentence is one word: "'NO,' she remonstrated." then that word carries all the extra water the one word can't hold. It's pacing. It's pointillism with words. There's no grammatical rule or punctuation or pedantry that's gonna get us there. We have to have the heart and soul of this person so deep in our thoughts and minds that we know instinctively how they'd say it and what extra little bang at the end we need to add. That doesn't come with "18 ways to flesh out a character." There have been billions of people on this planet, most of whom have had dozens of personalities that came between being born and dying. Knowing how to make a character real is to go out and meet them.

I've spoken of engagement with others before, so we'll skip over this here... though we'll come back to it again soon enough. For now, let's circle back to what we've suffered and what we've survived — because that's at the heart of this. We might suppose we have no particular way of saying, "I went to the lake," but there we'd be wrong. There's a reason why we don't add to that, or what things we add that we personally find important. There's a reason why we choose to give our interest to the water, the ducks, the sunset or the shore. We may not think there's a reason, but we'd be wrong... because everything we do, even the least important things, comes from somewhere. For most people, they can leave that reason on a shelf, to gather dust that never feels a feather. But we are writers, or we want to be. It is our work to find the reason, to intuit it about ourselves, so we can intuit it about others.

All around us, people are suffering, people are getting on with survival... and some are lucky enough to be past the latter and before the former. But we've all been through it over and over. We went through a basketful of traumas before we were four, as any parent can witness as the process unfolds. Most stories are about suffering a trauma and surviving it — and in each case that "survival" is nested in the one before. We got past our childhood, then our adolescence, then our first love, then working for a living, then marriage, then parenthood... and that's just the cliche order. There's disablement, rehabilitation, assimilation, abandonment, persecution... all the biggest words are saved for the worst things we suffer. Yet we're here, we're getting along and becoming what we are — it's this that we want to invest into the people of our story, guessing what their lives must have been like and what things they overcame.

A woman managing a horse farm should have gone through a series of these that someone in the city couldn't have. An entrepreneur running a company has made his Faustian bargains and sold his soul in a way that no chef in a restaurant could have. Our aunt went through some stuff... that, if like my aunts, we'll never learn. Yet not knowing what these things are, or were, or should be in our story, is not an excuse we can give. If we choose to write this person into our story — then it's our problem to consider, puzzle it out and conceive the life path that brought him or her to here. We can discount it, skipping the work, writing around it... but then we have no leg to stand on when someone tells us the story is bad. We're at fault for that. We didn't do the work.

But that's fine. Most don't. Let's admit it. Take a little time, look around, read some books, watch a few shows... we can see it everywhere. This character is see-through, that one makes decisions that clearly exist to drive the narrative, these others over here are just cut-outs waiting for the next scene. The evidence is everywhere. We don't need to be good writers to succeed. To get chosen for publication, to get the green light for our screenplay.

We don't owe anything to anybody if we want to take half measures and write something bad. But this series of essays isn't about that. Is it?