Stant Litore - Write Characters Your Readers Wont Forget

Despite the title, this chapter wont fix your dating life. I cant tell you why people fall in love. If Im writing a love story Ill try to show you, but I may not be able to tell you.

But I do want to help you see why readers fall in love with characters, so that you can help make that happen.

Lets back up a moment. Someone may have told you in junior high that there are three driving forces in any storyplot, theme, and character. (Actually there are a few more, but we wont get into that here). This book is about character. Youre going to have to go to another book to read up on how to create suspense (though Ill give you some hints on pacing in Chapter 7), or how to write existential angst or avoid orientalism in your fiction. This book is about writing characters that we will never forget. And I am writing you this book because character is the one out of that triad (theme, plot, and character) that we often do the worst job at. I have seen books turned down again and again by agents and editors whose comment was, I just didnt care enough about your character and her problems. And I have seen readers turn down a book that made it to the shelves because they simply were not drawn to the main character.

So lets talk about character.

And lets clear some of the clutter out of the way, right now. Most of the keys to great characterization that youve probably heard about are simply prerequisites, bare minimums. For example, writing a sympathetic or round character, one who has more than one dimension to their motivations and drives; writing a realistic character; writing a relatable character, one we can identify with, a character with whom we have things in commonthese all contribute to effective characterization, but theyre not the main thing you need to focus on. These are nothing more than the bare essentials. Looking for a round, sympathetic, realistic character is like looking to date someone attractive, healthy, and who shares your sexual orientation. Granted, you probably wont get far without those basic characteristics in place, but those things arent whats going to make you fall in love. Theyre just the minimum requirements. Most readers dont close the back cover of a novel and say, Wow, Rachel was so sympathetic! or Wow, Rachel was such a round character!

No. Instead they say, Wow, when Rachel stood up and slapped Dave at the partywow!

Or they say, I cant believe he did that! Wow!

Or they say, I wish I could be that brave.

Or that clever.

Or that daring.

Or that persevering.

We fall in love with characters we admire, characters we cant stop watching. Thats the secret to great storytelling, and everything else is just how we do it. Everything else is just courtship and wooing.

HOW OUR ADMIRATION GETS SPARKED

Heres the key point. As Donald Maass observed in The Career Novelist , great characters show strength of will. They may be physically weak, they may even be morally weak, but when it comes down to the wire, they have the will to make very difficult choices. And they make those choices with a bit of flair.

A student once described to me a historical novel that opens with a woman in the Tudor era walking into the middle of a road and standing there, as the full parade of the Tudor king and his court came down the road toward her. She had a petition to make and she wasnt going to let it go unnoticed. She would stop the entire court in the middle of that road if she had to. For a woman in the sixteenth century (or even for someone today), thats a pretty big choice, with dire consequences.

From the first pages of that novel, Im hooked. Even if I dont usually read a historical novel, Im hooked because that woman is showing such strength of will in a desperate situation that I want to know if shell succeed. I have to know. Im drawn to her. I admire her.

Now the character we fall in love with may be less dramatic than that Tudor woman. She may be a single mother fighting to pay off a debt. He may be a child of no particular brains or brawn but who will go to any length to help his friend (as in E.T. ). He may even be an addict, a man who has systematically demolished his life and his relationships, but we happen to catch him in the moment when he is facing his weakness, picking up the phone, and dialing for help. Maybe were watching a drunken pastor whose wife just stormed out, and now hes pouring his Scotch down the sink, one flask at a time.

Whatever the occasion, when we see strength of will, we sit up and pay attention. Its how were programmed, I suspect. Deep down, were primates, were tribal; were drawn to charisma wherever we find it, whether in big people or little people.

If you saw the movie True Grit , you might grasp what I mean. (Im thinking of the recent remake with Jeff Bridges.) You have three characters, all of them unlikely heroes: a Texas ranger with a huge insecurity problem, a washed-out old bounty hunter who spends his days dead drunk and seems generally unreliable, and a fourteen-year-old girl determined to apprehend her fathers killer. We fall in love with that girl, of course, because she lets nothing, not one thing, stand in her way, and we gradually fall in love with the other two because when it really comes down to it, they really do have true grit. They make the tough choices and they give it their all. The result is a powerful story that I will not soon forget.

Whoever your characters are, you need to find out what gives them their grit. What is your characters strength? When he smacks up against that big moment of choice, what is it inside him that drives him to make the choice he does? That addict picking up the phone what gives him the strength to do it, when hes failed so many times before? That Tudor woman in the middle of the road, what was it that allowed her to summon up the guts to stand there? Was it the ferocity of her love for an imprisoned son? Was it her fear of being dismissed and treated as having no value? Was it her love for her land and her commitment to her mothers memory and to keeping the land in her family? Was it her tendency to act on impulse and consider the consequences later? What was it?