In baseball, some pitchers have blazing fastballs, others have to get by on trickery, and others have to paint corners and employ superhuman accuracy. Writers are kind of in the same boat—some writers have a laser focus on plot and are able to sketch out incredible stories without much effort. Others can paint a character onto the page that feels like a real person talking to you. You can teach yourself to be great at just about every aspect of writing (mainly through reading, stealing, and writing, all constantly) but we all have things we’re naturally good at.
Sometimes the hardest thing is to honestly assess your own natural abilities. One thing I see from time to time in the work of younger writers is a belief that they’re very good at characters when in fact what they’re really doing is making every single character in their story more or less a version of themselves.
Agent Smith, I Presume
In the Matrix film trilogy, Agent Smith is a piece of code in the virtual world who eventually becomes a virus and begins replicating, taking over other pieces of code until the entire population of The Matrix are versions of Agent Smith.
When you base every character on yourself, that’s what you end up with. Basing a character on yourself is an easy way to ensure a certain amount of verisimilitude (and I may have offered that as advice in the past, actually, if you’re struggling with coming up with believable reactions for your characters, but then I drink a lot so who knows). But if you do it for every character in your book you end up with a bland sameness to all of your characters. It’s not a good look.
So how do you avoid this? Step one is recognizing you have a problem. The Agent Smith Problem is often the result of not reading widely and not paying attention to the world around you. If you’re too much in your own head, you carry a lot of assumptions about the world unchallenged. In other words, you start to think that the way you do things and the way you see the world is universal. Having those assumptions challenged is the key to writing better characters, because it helps you see your own patterns of thought, speech, and gesture in the characters you’re writing.
Funny how many writing problems are solved simply by reading a bit more.
Of course, I no longer suffer from The Agent Smith Problem because I am so much older and wiser and know everything now. Yessir, it’s good to never have to worry about bad writing ever again. Yessir. Whiskey for lunch? Why not.