characters

Characters are puppets. Ultimately, they exist solely to make your story happen, to pull plot levers and fall into deadly pits, to weep and laugh and leap and dance as per the program you feed into their CPU.

Of course, part of the challenge is taking these puppets and making them seem like real people, to weave that illusion that this collection of words is actually a person whose life and internal monologue we can magically tap into. It ain’t easy, and if you recently wrote a manuscript in which your characters basically stand around until the time comes for them to pull a plot lever and unleash some hounds, if all their dialog serves to explain plot mechanisms and the like, well, you aren’t the first, and you won’t be the last.

There are a lot of ways you can make your characters feel more like human beings with motivations and depth as opposed to automatons following your script. One of the most enjoyable and effective ways is to be generous with the words and page space and give your characters some downtime.

Now is the Time on Sprockets When We Dance

If you’ve ever watched a TV show and noted a scene where characters just sort of hang out, a scene where no plot work is done, a scene that seems to exist solely so the writers can tell a few jokes, that’s downtime. Essentially it’s a scene which accomplishes zero plot advancement and isn’t even concerned much with character development. It’s just a relaxed moment where the characters hang out, interact, and exist. It’s also a fantastic way to make them seem like real people, for the simple reason that we all engage in a lot of downtime.

It can feel like an expansive waste of space, because you’re not moving the story along. You’re just having some fun and letting your characters talk. But it does so much to make them seem like real, rounded people it’s totally worth it. Plus, since it doesn’t have much to do with the plot, it’s something you can actually insert into your story after the first draft is done. You’ve got the plot, you’ve got your characters in their positions so they can pull those plot levers. Now you just go back and insert a few downtime scenes to flesh them out.

It’s also fun, assuming you actually like your characters.

Of course if you overcorrect and write an entire novel composed of downtime, congratulations, you’ve just invented the mumblecore literary genre, you bastard.

When creating characters for your story, the most important thing is to have a sense of who they are as people. If you treat them like real people, they will jump off the page and be distinct to your reader, whereas dressing your characters up in gimmicks and crazy physical attributes in lieu of actual personality is a one-way trip to boring characters. A guy with a monkey sitting on his head is interesting for about a page-and-a-half. A guy who seems like he’s based on a real guy who happened to have a monkey sitting on his head is interesting for the entire story.

I have to start thinking more about these essays before I start writing.

Anyway, you still have to describe your characters, at least a little. At least upon first introducing them. And that’s difficult for some writers—what do you mention? If every character is described in the same way, that’s a problem, but you also want to avoid reducing them to the most obvious kinds of physical detail (skin color, eye color, etc). Here’s what I do: I imagine myself on a bus.

The Bus Trick

Most of my writing advice boils down to modeling everything on real life in some way, because I am a painfully lazy and literal person. The Bus Trick is simple: Think back to the last time you walked into a crowded public space filled with strangers. For me, a bus usually does the trick, but any venue where you met up with a few dozen total strangers will do.

Now, imagine the people who were there when you arrived. What did they look like? How would you describe them?

The details you come up with will be natural and telling, and can be re-purposed to describe your characters in natural and telling ways. Sure, you have to be aware of your own prejudices and assumptions here, but it’s still a great way to get authentic reactions, and a good way to ensure that you’re not describing your characters in the same way every time.

Just remember: When it comes to physically describing your characters, less is more. You will never do a better job than the imagination of your reader.

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.

Writing a first draft is always fun; in a recent conversation with Lee Child, he told me that he loved starting a first draft because he hadn’t screwed anything up yet—the book might still be great! While most writers put pressure on ourselves to get it right the first time, first drafts offer a lot of flexibility. Whatever doesn’t work you can revise, remove, or replace, after all, and no one ever has to see your tortured, confused, meandering first effort, unless, of course, you become incredibly famous, at which point you won’t mind showing off your genius process for writing novels.

But first drafts can also get a little messy. I generally produce pretty clean first drafts; if things go off the rails in a first draft for me, I usually don’t even finish the attempt, and if I finish the draft revision is generally just cleanup. As clean as my drafts usually are I still sometimes get into trouble, most frequently with that dreaded writing boogie man, the forgotten character.

Who Were You, Again?

This happened to me very recently. I started a new novel, and seeded in five main characters connected in a group. At around the 30,000 word mark, I suddenly had a realization: I hadn’t mentioned one of those five characters in several chapters. This meant that for weeks of work time, I’d completely forgotten that this character is in the novel.

Now, this can be a sign that your character shouldn’t be in the novel. After all, if you, the creator and miniature god of your fictional universe, can’t keep a character in your head, there’s probably a reason. I wrote an article for Writer’s Digest (“Kill Your Darlings”) about dealing with characters who might not need to be there, and one technique I mentioned is combining characters, which might be just what this book needs.

On the other hand, the characters are in a group, and I worry that thinning that group down too much might make it less believable. So, for the moment, I’ve decided to keep the character in there by the simple expedient of mentioning his name every now and then and giving him meaningless dialog to chime in with. This way, he’s still there, and if I find a use for him later, great! And if I don’t, I can eliminate him secure in the knowledge that he has no purpose anyway.

Of course what I really should be worried about are the real people in my life that no one else seems to see or hear. But that can wait until this book is done.

Writing a novel or a story of any kind always begins in that infinite white expanse, that void. It’s like you’re beamed down to this arctic wasteland with a bag of tools and it’s up to you to build a shelter, get a fire going, and hunt down some people to help you create a whole universe. Those people are your characters.

This can all go different ways. Fairly often, the shelter you build will be flimsy and leaky, the fire you start will gutter and smoke, and the people you drag out of the featureless wilderness will be the sort of assholes you can’t bear to spend one minute with. That’s when you pull out the satellite phone and call for the chopper, soak the campsite in gasoline, and set the whole place ablaze as you hang from a rope ladder being carted off to the next featureless campsite.

Even if you manage to get a toehold in one of these wildernesses, the problem of populating it can remain. Sometimes your characters just don’t work out. And sometimes you just have to hang around trapping characters until you meet one you like.

The Most Dangerous Game

Our characters are usually based at least in part on people we actually know, either consciously or unconsciously. And that means that sometimes the people we sketch out in an early draft are not people we want to spend any time with, which can poison the whole story. Even villains need to be entertaining and interesting on some level; after all, we don’t always like the people we spend time with, do we? But sometimes those people are goddamn entertaining.

The trick with characters, sometimes, is twofold. On the one hand you have to remember that characters can be portable—just because a story you’re working on isn’t working doesn’t mean that one or more of the characters you’ve created can’t be moved into a different story, a new setting. On the other hand, coming up with characters you want to spend time with is sometimes just a matter of hanging out in a story long enough to meet one you like. In other words, just keep inventing people until you Frankenstein one that catches your interest.

Once you have one or two worthwhile characters, you can surgically remove them from the mess you’ve been working on and start fresh—and now that you have characters you like, the story might come easier, because just imagining two characters interacting often results in a story more or less organically.

Of course, as in life, sometimes you’ll find yourself in that wasteland of ideas until 4AM, headachy and bleary-eyed, surrounded by assholes. When that happens … gasoline and a chopper.

One of the most important things a writer can develop is a healthy skepticism about their own assumptions and worldview. We’re all living in bubbles, in a sense, and people naturally assume their successes are the result of their own virtues—that luck, privilege, and circumstance have nothing or very little to do with it. Realizing where your own assumptions come from doesn’t mean you change your mind about everything, but it does mean you can analyze yourself—which means you’ll be better able to analyze your characters.

Oddly, this sort of awareness and analysis can be paralyzing when it comes to writing characters in your fiction, because the more you realize how much of your worldview is the product of upbringing, environment, and experiences, the more you realize how little you understand your fellow human beings. In other words, the more you understand yourself, the less you understand other people.

The Other

Now, this is healthy, because assuming everyone else thinks and experiences life exactly the way you do is what gives us the gift of our Drunk Uncles telling us that Donald Trump is our political savior. You should have a healthy sense of doubt and terror when writing about characters that are drawn from walks of life other than your own. But it’s a mistake to go too far and assume that just because someone is a different gender, race, or culture they’re so completely unknowable that you can’t write them. It’s a mistake for two reasons: One, you’re wrong about that, and two, it leads you to write characters who are just you in different clothes, which is kind of boring.

This isn’t to say that you can sit down and write about someone utterly different from yourself without doing some work to get it right. But people all over the world have similar concerns, so it’s a mistake to assume that, for example, women are alien creatures with incomprehensible motivations. All humans share some basics, and humans within a specific culture share even more basics. Writing the Other isn’t always easy, and there are plenty of ways to go wrong, but the easiest way to go wrong is to assume that people who don’t look like you or live where you live might as well come from Jupiter and eat like Brundlefly.

Back in my college days, of course, a surfeit of lite beer meant I did sometimes eat like Brundlefly. Let’s not discuss it, ever.