Writers: Trait Your Characters Well
What Is and What Isn’t a Trait
If you have read any of my Medium articles on writing and were asked to assign me a primary character trait, I’m sure that ‘contrary’ would rank on your shortlist (as it is on those of my wife and many others). After all, I spend a lot of time contradicting what many consider the rules and protocols for becoming a writer. A lot of them — most, in fact — are wrong (or misguided), confusing, and even drive writers from the craft.
Character traits are another area where, it seems to me, available advice fails to help writers and instead encourages them to think themselves inadequate. This is because too many sources consider ‘traits’ to include physical attributes, emotional states, social status, and learned skills.
While important considerations in any story, these are not ‘traits.’ These may influence and affect a character’s traits, but that does not equate to being the same thing. They may accumulate and combine to be the cause of a trait, but these are not the trait itself.
What’s a ‘Trait,’ Then?
Character traits refer to an individual’s personal attitudes and beliefs and, like a coin, may be positive or negative. They are a distillation of the character’s life experiences crystallized into tinted lenses through which the character interprets their world.
The traits you so carefully choose strengthen your character and, more importantly, serve to keep their actions consistent.
‘Sincere’ and ‘reliable’ are positive character traits, just as ‘insincere’ and ‘unreliable’ are their negatives. ‘Brawny,’ ‘depressed,’ ‘wealthy’ and ‘carpenter’ describe a character’s attributes, but they are not traits.
Physical Attributes
Age, gender, height, weight, ethnicity — these are a character’s physical endowments. These are important facets of your character and may have a huge impact on traits — skin colour, for example, or a disability may serve as causes for a trait— but they are not the character’s outlook on life.
Being ‘brawny’ is an appropriate attribute for a character with a ‘bully’ trait, just as ‘overweight’ might be paired with either ‘gregarious’ or ‘shy.’
Emotional State
‘Anger’ is an emotional state, usually temporary, but if, for some reason endures in a character could make them ‘belligerent,’ ‘vengeful,’ ‘vindictive’ or ‘resentful.’
Social Status
Yes, a character’s social and economic background can profoundly affect which traits your character embraces, but ‘rich’ is no more a trait than ‘impoverished.’ Someone from a wealthy background is far more likely to feel entitled than a character who knew true hunger as a child and is now resentful, viewing wealth as synonymous with greed and selfishness.
Learned Skills
An accountant may come to see his world as a balance sheet and a lawyer begins to see integrity as a commodity, so the one chooses a life partner based on her socio-economic status rather than love and the other refines semantic games to justify dishonesty, but their skills are not traits.
Unique Characters Need the Right Traits
Your protagonist’s character traits are what make her unique and her emotional journey memorable after your tale is told. The best character traits play off your hero’s emotional journey and reinforce your story’s theme.
Yet, too many writers trip themselves up with their choice of character traits. Others simply ignore the importance of traits or, equally problematic, select so many that none show through.
Impatience
Writers choose their characters’ traits too early, without giving the characters any opportunity to decide for themselves.
Go ahead, laugh. I’ll come back to this.
Perhaps the writer loves a particular trait — she wants to create a strong, handsome male lead but cannot understand how to bring that trait alive in an office setting. Your character’s traits have to meld with your story. They should reflect some element of your story’s theme. Yeah, it sounds scary, but really, it’s not — again, more on this later.
I’m not saying not to create romance cover-worthy heroes, just make sure there’s room in your story for the character to show it.
Don’t decide too early who your character is, or choose a trait because it reminds you of your uncle. I have always found there is value in resisting early impulses to define the personalities of your characters. By all means, create a list of possibilities, but focus first on your story’s theme and your hero’s emotional arc.*
*Theme and emotional arc sound scary (and they can be), but when you know how to discern them within your story — not that difficult — it will seem like gazing down on the landscape of your narrative from above. I have deconstructed these and other story-crafting topics here (and no paywall):
Both Sides Now
Traits can be positive or negative. If your heroine is affectionate, why wouldn’t you place her in a situation that forces her to become secretive or guarded? Instant conflict. And conflicted characters are memorable.
There are lists of character traits on the web. Some, those that are free, are simply lists of traits. Others are colour-coded, but we’re writers, remember, not visual artists. Same traits, and the same words, just less pretty.
Your short lists of traits for your characters should have two columns, one for positive ones and a second for negative ones. When you think of a possible trait, consider its contradictory options, too. Think about how the negative trait impacts your positive one. If the impact is minimal, find another one.
To help, I have included a link to a free list of traits at chompingatthelit.com. This site is an excellent resource.
Matters of Degree
Similarly, character traits are like the staggered height diving boards at a swimming pool, each more dramatic than the one you climbed from. The same goes for traits.
The intensity of whatever character trait you choose matters. A lot. For instance, someone who is generous with their time, or regularly shares their change with the less fortunate, knows when to stop. Once their pocket is empty, that’s it. But if they made a detour to an ATM to withdraw the $20 they had planned to spend on a movie to help out a hungry, homeless person, ‘generous’ becomes ‘selfless.’
The degree of investment in any trait ‘stream’ is important. Your reader won’t connect to your selfless heroine if she jams just when she’s needed most. Nor will they accept a generous hero who impoverishes themselves for insufficient reason.
Trait Overload
I’m sure I don’t need to point out that however many traits you burden your hero with, priorize them (not ‘prioritize,’ such an ugly word). Three. Maybe. Make the least of them contradictory to the main one and then challenge your protagonist’s emotional journey (again, kinda scary but not when you know how to ‘see’ it and how to break it down) by forcing them to discover that they’ve been looking at life all wrong and, in fact, they now want to focus on what they ignored before.
Traits Aren’t Just for Heroes
Support character traits are often more critical than your hero’s, and even cameos and walk-ons should have a trait (or something from the list of non-trait attributes above) that makes their role memorable.
Give support characters a trait which makes them useful and a second one which conflicts with another character.
Your antagonist should also have both positive and negative traits.
Trust Your Story to Define Your Characters
If you invest the time to not just think about but immerse your imagination in exploring the vast potentials of your story, twisting or upending it by asking ‘what if?’ and ‘why?’ to find that one narrative thread you connect with.
From there, possible themes will announce themselves and, by reflecting them, in turn, back onto your narrative setting, suitable emotional arcs will be revealed as glinting bridges between them and you will find your creative options gain clarity of purpose and your tale take on a life of its own.
The relationships between story, theme, and emotional arc inform the type of hero you need and whom they could be. But I’m getting off-track, here. It’s easier to show than tell, and I have done precisely that using a work of my own and how I used this process to develop it in a sequence of articles titled ‘Notebook to Narrative.’
