Fyodor Doeskeskty said that there are two kinds of stories: a man leaves on a journey, or a stranger comes to town. Bridging the gap between these oversimplified halves is character, that man or stranger who incites action throughout the story.
Simpler than Doeskeskty, a story is this: a character brings something about.
Whether we want to write sprawling novels that absorb our readers into our worlds, or passionate short stories that linger in the heads of our readers for weeks, we will need to master the craft of character building first. Without strong characters, don’t expect readers to become invested in our story.
In this article we’ll go through the best ways to improve the characters in our story and how to make believable characters from scratch.
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Key Takeaways:
- Character and perspective are deeply intertwined
- Characterization is done through dialogue, appearance, action, and thought
- Character choice moves the plot forward, not the other way around
Characters and Perspective:
Any hobbyist author can tell us that one of the first choices we make when writing a story is which perspective to use. Perspective itself is an article for another day, but in simplest terms, it is the lens through which we view the story.
These are the three most common perspectives used by authors:
- First person- I, we, us
- Third person- he, she, they
- Second person- you
Each perspective comes with its own advantages and disadvantages. First person is excellent for putting our readers into the body and mind of our main character. They have full access to the protagonist’s mind and can feel the full breadth of their emotions. Third person allows for an impartial view of events, making it ideal for use in stories with groups of interesting characters. The second person is rarely used, but effectively transforms the reader into a character in the story.
Knowing which perspective we will use will inform our character building. Joshua Ferris utilizes the first person plural in his novel Then We Came to the End as a means of illustrating the sense of community within a toxic workplace. In doing so, he assigns the role of protagonist to an entire office, circumventing the main pitfall of the first person perspective. However, when everyone is the main character, no one is; the result is a merging of individuals into a single entity, the office, that shares a similar goal: avoid being fired.
While Then We Came to the End may be an eccentric example, but the point is evident: perspective and character must work in tandem. This is something that must be decided upon early in the writing process.
Characterization:
Characterization is how we as authors give personality to the people that populate our stories. It is important to show, rather than tell, a reader the traits of a character. Janet Burroway states in Writing Fiction: A Guide to Narrative Craft that it can be achieved in four basic ways:
- Dialogue
- Appearance
- Action
- Thought
Dialogue is an element of writing craft that many authors utilize with great effectiveness. It is the spoken interactions between characters. This extends to how the words are spoken, the body language used, and even what remains unsaid. While dialogue is an effective means of characterization, it cannot substitute one or all of the other means.
Appearance and action occur between the moments of narrative summary and dialogue that comprise many stories. Consider a man who eats a Snicker’s bar with a fork and knife. There is an automatic characterization of his personality based solely on this action. Similarly, a person’s appearance can tell much about other things that make up the totality of their character. our ability to use these means of characterization will rely on our ability to expressively convey the reality of their actions or appearance.
Thoughts are about as close as our readers will get to our characters. An individual’s thoughts are a window into their subconscious, and should accurately reflect what we envision as our character’s true self. Of course, thoughts are often not reliable and are subject to issues lapses in judgment or memory. These inconsistencies should be reflected in our writing, and clever writers will use the shortfalls of thought as devices to further develop character.
Character choice:
At this point in character creation, we’ve settled on our perspective, we’ve thought about the appearance of our character(s) and how they’ll act, how they’ll think. It is now time to consider the most important role a character plays in our story: choice.
Choice is at the heart of every character driven story. The choices that people make shape the outcomes of their lives. Every choice represents a branching path with either direction leading somewhere equally possible. In a story, there is only one path, one string of decisions that connects events together. However, when tracing the path a story takes, a reader should be able to mark places where characters made choices that impacted the direction of the plot.
Consider that we choose everything to include in our story. Nothing without purpose makes it to the final draft. Similarly, nothing happens to a character in a story for no reason. In a plot dominated story, characters are robbed of the agency to choose that real humans possess, making it more difficult for readers to relate to them. Ideally, major plot developments should be tied to character choice in some way, big or small. Wrong choices especially have the opportunity to push our story to unexpected places.
Here is a short list of small choices we can give to our character that could potentially snowball into impactful story moments:
- Taking a different path home
- Sitting next to someone new
- Quitting a bad habit
- Wearing something different
- Picking up that shiny object
Of course, these are minor examples of character choice, but any one could be the first of many that cascade into a story that changes our character forever.
Conclusion:
If you’re an aspiring writer, it is our job to engrave character craft into our writing process. It is not as simple as writing an interesting backstory or having a cool design; characters are models of human beings, even the ones that might not be quite human. They must be well integrated into our story because our story wraps around them.
For more in depth discussion on specific elements of writing craft, read my other articles. Follow my Twitter at https://twitter.com/rankupwriting.
