the craft. deeper with characters.
This week, as a part of our Develop Your Story campaign for the month of November, we kicked off talking about characters, and how to create depth so that they read as fully formed people within your story. I want to dig a little deeper into the real work of this and why it’s so beneficial to your storytelling to have fully fleshed out characters.
Think for a moment about the books you’ve read where the characters felt like real people. I hated Feyi in You Made a Fool of Death With Your Beauty. She was selfish, insufferable, and somehow was able to convince some that she was a victim. But whether a reader loves or hates your character, they should feel something.
I remember some of the earliest feedback from an agent about Good Morning, Love was that they didn’t feel bought into Carli’s character. It was true. I think I’ve talked about it before in this newsletter that somehow, I’d spend a lot more time with Tau’s character than hers. Picture that as she was the protagonist, but I digress. When I went back, I had to do some work on making the reader understand more about who she was right from the beginning. Readers don’t have a lot of time to let a character slowly burn. It’s important that right at the start, we know exactly who they are.
I think about it in the context of films and TV shows often. It’s almost as if you get a little index at the start. Now, these characters are going to change over the course of the story, that’s what makes it interesting, but it’s helpful to know that they’re the A-type go-getter and someone else is the lazy person who came from wealth, or that this person is a bully, etc. We have to establish the character in their real world within the first 10% of the book.
The other extremely important thing to know about a character is what they desire. We all have a myriad of desires, wants, and needs as human beings. The whole point of the story you’re writing is to tell the story of how the character either gets to that desire or in some cases, doesn’t, even though they tried. I appreciate the way Crystal Wilkinson describes this in her essay, Asking Questions and Excavating Memory, from the Hurston/Wright Foundation’s How We Do It book on craft. She refers to characters as:
“Folks in a specific physical place, doing something specific, navigating their experiences, wanting something (often something they can’t have) and these folks come with a lifetime of psychological history and reasons they can’t have the things they desire or deserve.”
This is truly the crux of who characters are in a story, and what our job as the writer is to convey. Doing this well, does take a certain amount of excavation outside of the manuscript pages. There are dozens of character profiles to explore, like the one Fajr Muhammad shared from her PTW Masterclass on writing everyday people. There are a host of other exercises for spending time with your characters that you can do as well. I wrote letters from my characters to one another, and I’ll share a little from one of them here:
Milan,
I’ve never found myself in this position. I’ve been a loyal husband to Yara for the past nine years. Our coming together wasn’t usual. When my father died, there was nothing keeping my mother here on the island. She was free from his oppression. While she wanted me to finish high school in the States, I was much too connected to this land. In comes Yara’s family whom we’ve known for years. I had a place to stay, but Yara had become pregnant by an older man who wanted nothing to do with her. It would have been a knock to their reputation in the brotherhood. She was impure, unless there was someone, staying for free in their home who could help them cover it up. We married in a ceremony under a waning moon. And as much as I love Yara, this was not necessarily the life I sought for myself. Thankfully, I was able to make it to university in the States, but I had a wife and child to care for, so I returned. I’ve lived that life with pride and honor, but I find myself wondering lately, what is for me?
This goes on a bit more of course, but what I wanted to do was spend time trying to understand how these characters could engage in a relationship that was outside of Ainsley’s marriage. What would make him a fully realized character vs someone who is simply disingenuous and stepping outside of his marriage? It is an uncomfortable truth, that sometimes we are in situations we didn’t create for ourselves and trying to figure out how to get out of them is a challenge.
These letters won’t make it into the book of course. But this quote that Wilkinson includes in her essay from Ernest Hemingway sums it up quite nicely.
“If a writer of prose knows enough about what he is writing about, he may omit things that he knows and the reader, if the writer is writing truly enough, will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them. The dignity of movement of an iceberg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water.”
We dig down deeply into the characters, only to reveal small pieces of who they actually are in the story. We leave some to be inferred by the reader, and we reveal other parts as the story progresses. Here is where we get to make choices as a writer and decide what's important for the reader to know and when.
I love getting to know my characters in this way. It helps me feel deeply connected to them, and certainly helps me with how they show up in each scene of the story. I still think about Carli and Tau by way of getting to know them intimately throughout the writing process.
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