Characters Strategies for Compelling Fiction

Characters that fail to engage are among the most common reasons that books are rejected or poorly received. What are your characters hiding from you? What are they hiding from themselves? Learn to develop compelling, multi-faceted characters and you’ll captivate readers.

From a recent workshop I taught on character development, here are three exercises that can help breathe life into characters that haven’t yet come into their own:

·         Interview your character, allow him or her to answer in voice. Start with three easy warm-up questions, such as where the character grew up or her favorite color. Then ask at least three harder questions: What are you keeping secret from your creator? (The creator, of course, is you, the author) In what way is your creator not being fair to you? What do you think about your capacity for love? For examples of insightful questions plus answers in voice, check out the Paris Review interviews with your favorite authors.

·         Make a Johari window for your character. I make these on index cards, with the traits in pencil so I can change them and move them from pane to pane as my characters reveal more of themselves on the page.

·         As suggested by literary agent Donald Maass, answer these questions about the connection between you and your main character: Why are you writing this story? How does it connect to you? What in your protagonist’s experience parallels your own? What need is most like yours? What fear is closest to your own darkest dread? What decision has an impossible cost, a cost you’ve paid yourself? When in the story could you be sitting in your protagonist’s place? Why there and then?

Always to be generous with your characters. Don’t lock them in. Allow them their complexities and contradictions, as long as they’re believable within the context. Allow their development to happen in layers, aided by the insights of good readers and editors. 

Window on Your Characters

We all know how characters are revealed: by what they do, by what they say, and by what others say about them. Not a bad place to start, but for the writer it’s not enough.

Compelling characters also have self-regard. “Their emotions matter to them,” Donald Maass explains in Writing the Breakout Novel. “They do not dismiss what they experience. They embrace life. They wonder about their responses to events and what such responses mean. They take themselves seriously- and by the way, a sense of humor about oneself is the flip side of the same coin.”

Steve Almond one-ups Maass, warning writers not to settle for self-regard over self-examination. Navel-gazing isn’t enough, he says. Characters must look into the dark regions of their heart, those places they want to repress. Look no farther than Victorian fiction to see what kind of mileage writers get from characters who stifle their dark impulses. For that matter, look no farther than the modern tendency toward flagrant self-regard. Whatever reprehensible thing you might think, feel or be, you have only to out it and let everyone else figure out how to deal with it. (If you don’t recognize this attitude, you’re not paying enough attention to social media and reality TV).

Whether repressed or prideful, a character’s capacity for self-examination can be considered through the handy panes of the Johari Window, developed in 1955 as a tool for psychological assessment and more recently co-opted by business for team-building. After my characters have shown themselves strong enough to withstand my attempts to pigeonhole them, I break out the windows to help me figure out what they know about themselves and what others know about them. “Others,” by the way, doesn’t mean my readers or me. In the narrative universe, we’re demi-gods – able to see more than the players in the story, but never all-knowing.

The top left-hand pane of the window is the arena, or open area. Here reside those aspects of character that are visible to everyone. To its right is pane 2, the blind spot (sometimes called a bubble): those things others understand about the character while the poor schlep himself has no idea. Voice often resides here. As in real life, character aren’t usually conscious of how they sound.

Even the most introspective characters will be clueless about other aspects of themselves. When Rivka Galchen was working on her novel, she read a lot of real-life confessions, and what she saw time and again was how no matter how much people set out to confess, there were always some things to which they were blind, like Rousseau who confessed to nearly everything a man could, save admitting he’d fathered and abandoned five children. “That reading helped me understand how interesting it is to have someone be wrong about himself,” Galchen says.

Lack of awareness should never descend into pathos, but buffoonery works. “I think there’s a level of blind self-love in buffoonish characters and a level of delusion and a certain amount of well-meaningness that I find incredibly touching,” says author Chris Abani.

Pane 3 is where you put things characters know about themselves that others don’t see. This usually involves some sort of cover-up, either subconscious or intentional, which is why this pane is sometimes called the façade .“We are all telling the same two stories,” Almond says, “the one about who we want to believe we are, and the one about who we know ourselves to be. Nearly all the humiliating events in our lives (and, for that matter, in good prose) can be said to arise from the collision of these two stories.” When characters engage in intentional cover-ups, they’re taking themselves seriously enough to recognize the gap between these two stories and to try to conceal it; this subversion is in fact one of the first acts of “growing up.” In pane 3, we’re not playing around. It’s not bumper cars; it’s more like a nuclear reactor.

Pane 4 contains the unknown, those things characters don’t know about themselves, things no one else in the story knows about them either. But you – and your reader – may see them, or at least grope in that direction. There’s lots to mine in Pane 4. Deep shame and its counterpart mercy often lurk there. And while desire can fill any pane, it’s most interesting in this one. Ditto for grudges.  It’s because of pane 4 that we want to hang with our characters even after the story is over. Jose Manuel Prieto describes one of his characters in Nocturnal Butterflies of the Russian Empire “inexhaustible to me in his enigma.”

Once the unknown becomes known, it exits this pane for either panes 3, 2, or 1, depending on the character’s capacity and courage for self-examination. In this way, as Almond puts it, our characters become “unburdened of the glorious secret of who they really are.”

On the Road with Our Characters

A stranger comes to town. Someone goes on a journey. The old adage claims every story is either one or the other. But where are these characters going? Who’s directing the traffic? Does anyone have an itinerary?

These questions are vital to character development, a stodgy term that belies the dynamic nature of character. For insight, I turn to an unlikely source: the monks of New Skete. I’m not Catholic, nor am I Orthodox, as these monks are. My initial acquaintance with them had nothing to do with writing or spiritual thinking. My puppy was sweet but stubborn and often one step ahead of me. The monks raise and train German Shepherds, and they wrote a great book on bringing the best out in dogs.

If only characters were so easy to train. But training is hardly the point. We can all agree with Flannery O’Connor that the story form is organic. “The only way, I think, to learn to write short stories is to write them, and then to try to discover what you have done,” O’Connor says. “In most good stories it is the character’s personality that creates the action of the story. “If you start with a real personality, a real character, then something is bound to happen; and you don’t have to know what before you begin. In fact it may be better if you don’t know what before you begin.”

Fair enough. The writer is not a travel agent, mapping itineraries her characters. Technique becomes useful only when you’ve traveled a ways with them already, and you’ve got a story – at least a rough one – before you. But while there’s no surefire, step-by-step, 100% guaranteed process for discovering your characters on the page, there are useful perspectives. The journey is one, and that’s where the monks of New Skete come in.

In another book (not the manual on dog training), the monks address the inner work that leads to greater depth and breadth of happiness, which in one form or another is the desire of every character, even if some of them are determined to twist it into something else. Borrowing from the monks, we could say that the itineraries of our characters involve growing in consciousness, facing what reality demands of them, living more authentically and universally, and moving even incrementally toward self-knowledge. Along the way, they encounter a common roadblock: the impulse to save themselves even if the cost is their own full humanity.

You may infuse your characters with all sorts of emotions and launch them on a wild roller-coaster ride, but in the end emotion is only reactive. Your characters need spirit, or soul, or whatever other term you prefer if those sound too religious.

It’s on journeys that our characters become real, journeys in which they grow in consciousness despite the impulse to save themselves, journeys in which they seek happiness, whether they know it or not, and where they encounter authenticity, whether they mean to or not. How they get there is up to them, and to you. How they get there is story.