The evolution of learning to write good characters is honestly the most cringe-worthy, embarrassing process of a young writer’s life. 100%, you will start by making complete copies of yourself, people you know, or common story tropes. You’ll think giving Sarah a love of Easter Peeps will somehow make up for her “nerd-girl definitely not looking for love but actually looking for love” basic-ness. But it won’t. It’ll just be the thing that tips people over onto the side of hating her.
Honestly, I wish some of my OG characters were as interesting as Sarah.
Its an easy trap to fall into; worried your characters will be bland? Write what you know. But most of the time, especially early on, that just means you fall into the trap of making them you. Or people you know. Which is awkward.
Worried your character is too much like you? Too oddly specific and takes the same mental shortcuts as you, so no one really “gets” them? Give them basic trope traits. But oh shit, now they’re a cardboard cut-out.
Walking this line is one of the most annoying things to get better at, but its also one of the most essential to writing. Why? Well, once you have believable characters, the dialogue becomes more believable. And what comes with that balance is also the fact you learn to know your characters well, be able to understand their likes and dislikes without sitting down with a spreadsheet and mad-libbing the shit out of things. Then the dialogue AND characters feel real. And when they do, and when you understand them, sometimes the story just grows itself.
That also can be an annoying thing, but that can be a how-to guide for another time.
But Stephanie, how do I get to this annoying balance of wonder?
I’ll give you the short version. The short version I wish I had before I wrote at least 13 Stephanie clones with terrible dialogue. You’re welcome, because the leftover garbage literature I have from that is frightening. I think it eats my socks when I’m not looking.
The key to balanced characters that aren’t cookie cutter, but aren’t unintelligible clones of yourself, is to only pick a few parts of you and then pick deliberate parts that aren’t you, put them in a petrie dish, and let them grow.
I’m probably defying all writing laws by telling you this, but the method I will describe has always been an absurdly easy way to learn to know my characters, even if sometimes it’s wildly inefficient. I choose 2-3 traits of my own to make the character easier to connect with. Then I choose 2-3 counter traits I don’t understand. Often, I do research for those traits or dig into the few moments I relate to those things, even if they aren’t a base part of who I am. Then, I write random-ass character scenes for them for at least 10,000 words.
You see the inefficient part?
Oftentimes, by the time I’m finished with my novel, most of those 10,000 words are washed away. But also, most of the time a really great, character-defining scene isn’t, and it becomes the basis of my understanding of that character.
A great example is Maggie Caspen, a character I wrote for my book that I’m currently editing, Dial 20 for Hermit Crabs. This novel, like Blue, focuses on mental illness. This time, anxiety.
Maggie, like me, loves the ocean and its critters. Maggie and I also deal with anxiety and not liking being around people much because of it. Maggie and I also love YouTube and movies.
Unlike me, Maggie doesn’t much like reading. Maggie also was fairly popular in college and got around the party scene, something I vehemently avoided. Maggie’s dream job is to be a zoological researcher, a job I thought I wanted for 30 seconds in college before quickly quitting and becoming a writing major instead.
There’s more small similarities, and equal dissimilarities, but the point is made. I try to make her equal parts relatable to myself while also being someone I don’t know much about. It creates of balance of easily connected emotions and feelings I can describe, while putting enough distance between us that I can define them as her emotions, and her perspective on them, not mine.
And her story changed so much as she developed. When I first began the story, she was a girl who ran away from college because of her anxiety and ended up on a Northeastern coastal city, doing the house care for a cranky old lady. The more I wrote, the more I learned Maggie never would leave her family like that. However people-fearing, they were a comfort to her that she feared hurting. Running away was something I would do. Maggie, I learned, never would run. She’d curl into herself and hide.
I think the only scene I ended up salvaging from that initial 10,000 is a scene where one night, she finally breaks down in front of a friend of hers. It was my practice scene where I was forced to be my most raw and open about who she was. I think the rest of her character grew from there. It was one of the last scenes I wrote before actually starting to string together the real plot, and its mattered so much in the creation of her story.
Stephen King puts it a way I like, even though I lean far more towards realistic fiction than him. He likes to think of his characters, put them in a situation, then go from there. He does it a bit differently, writing just a continuous stream of events as his process, but the concept is still applicable. And as someone so sharply focused on my characters, my way makes sense for me. But either way, we both let our characters lead the way.
And that’s what I did with Maggie. Girl has terrible panic attack at college and gets kicked out. What next?
Same with Blue. Boy deals with crippling depression, but doesn’t really understand what it is. What next?
And more exciting, Red. Young man tried to die and instead lived. What next?
The combination of my style of growing characters and King’s “what if” imagination process can be a real winner when it comes to trying to build characters organically. Yeah, you’ll probably write a lot of material that might just be junked. But by the end you’ll likely have characters you understand better than you understand most people you’ll meet.
Cheesy and depressing as it sounds, this way of things has made my characters more like friends to me than strangers on a page. I root for them, I want to console them, I get annoyed with them, I get to laugh because of them. It may sounds pretty “sad cat lady”, but I personally adore it and shamelessly love writing like this. I think its a way to make some of the most honest and relatable characters I’ve ever known. But maybe I feel that way because I’ve made them all up in my head.
Hope this helps you at all with your writing. I know it makes everything better with mine.
Happy Monday!
Creatively Disordered 