by Jason Black
We’ve all heard to keep conflict in every scene, to maintain pacing and sustain our readers’ interest. However, the way a character conducts himself during a conflict is wildly indicative of what kind of person that character is. Every conflict revolves around a set of axes that govern the manner in which the conflict unfolds, and each axis presents characters with a choice: to take the high road, or the low. Those choices speak volumes about the people themselves.
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We all want readers to feel positively towards our protagonists. Even if we’re writing an anti-hero, we still want readers to be rooting for that character. No matter what kind of protagonist you’ve got, that protagonist needs the reader’s sympathies in order for the book to work. There are two parts to this equation: the sympathy, and the hero. I’ll tackle heroism first.
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It's true. From time to time, writers dismember their characters. I don't mean they do it with cleavers or chainsaws. I don't mean that this happens in the plot. They do it with grammar. When writers put a character’s parts in the grammatical subject position instead of the character herself, the character can come to exist not so much as her whole self but as a collection of individual body parts that happen to be arranged in a vaguely human manner.
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Think about the great novels, the breakout novels, the ones that not only force readers to consume pages like potato chips but also leave readers thinking and talking about the book later. Those books have something in common besides the envy of many writers: their authors are masters of working with their characters’ goals.
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If you haven't heard by now the advice to work some sort of character arc into your novel, chances are you haven't been listening. A character arc is no great mystery. It is nothing more than the process by which a character becomes a better person. You get to decide what "better" means in the context of your book, and how the process of achieving it plays out within your plot.
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The most common piece of advice you're likely to hear about creating lifelike, fully three-dimensional characters is to give them a character arc. "Let the character grow and change throughout the story," you'll be told. "Show us that the character has emerged from the story as a better, wiser human being."
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Young children are hard to represent well on the page. Especially kids from three to about ten years of age. Not only is it difficult to remember what it was like to be so young, but most of us also lack training in the particular ways in which young children differ from adults. Little kids are not simply miniature adults.
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An epiphany is not a character arc
When plotting out or revising your novel, it’s important to understand the difference between an epiphany and a character arc. Both are useful and important, but they serve very different roles in the narrative. They are salt and sugar: both dry, white, granular materials, both similarly important in cooking, but not remotely interchangeable.
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There are certain elements any story needs to present in order for readers to believe in the story, in order for them to accept the made-up events of your novel as sufficiently real to be worth caring about. One of the most important elements relates to disbelief.
It's ironic, but to engage your readers' belief you need to create appropriate disbelief by the characters in the story.
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What character is in every scene and on every page of your novel? Don’t be so quick to say “none.” I don’t care what kind of book you’re writing. Even a third-person omniscient book with dozens of characters has one who is in every scene and on every page.
It’s you.
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First there was Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire. Fast-forward 35 years—yes, it really has been that long—and the monster books are in full blossom. Zombies and steampunk mix in Cherie Priest’s Boneshaker. Werewolves are something of the new hotness in paranormal romance, giving a new twist to the bad-boy love interest.
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We writers shower our protagonists with authorial love. We give them challenges they can just barely overcome, faults and foibles which make the challenges harder. We imbue them with character arcs and shower our attentions upon them.
But our villains need some love too. In particular, they need character arcs.
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Many moons ago, I wrote a pair of articles on dialogue, one on writing more realistic dialogue and one on making your different characters’ dialogue sound different. Those are both important, but dialogue is also a key tool of characterization.
Dialogue is all about nuance. There are almost limitless ways to say any particular thing you want to say, but each carries its own flavor.
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We’ve all heard the warning that characters who are too perfect—who have “Superman syndrome”—are difficult for readers to believe in and are boring to read. Thus, we are well advised to give our characters some flaws. Still, while it’s all well and good to have a character who is afraid of the color yellow or who simply cannot remember anybody’s name until the third time he hears it, does that really help your story? If that’s all the flaw is, probably not.
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We all know what a character arc is, right? It’s when a character ends the novel wiser, more mature--somehow better--than before. But did you know there are two basic kinds of arcs, which you can mix-and-match into four distinct character arc strategies to employ across your whole book?
The first kind is the typical “inner character arc.” This is what we most often think of when we think of character arcs. It’s when the character learns to overcome, through the experiences he has during the novel, some kind of flaw.
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Abbot had Costello, Lucy had Ricky, Holmes had Watson, and Gilligan had The Skipper. Characters are never alone. It’s simple; we are social creatures. We go better together. Some part of us needs others with whom to share our thoughts and feelings.
Even characters who seem to be alone often aren’t, although their companions may take unusual forms. In Cast Away, shipwrecked Chuck Nolan had his volleyball. In 2001: A Space Odyssey, astronaut Dave Bowman had HAL, the murderous computer nemesis who is without doubt the most well-remembered character in the story.
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There’s really no denying that the publishing industry is particularly hot for young adult and paranormal books right now. Largely we can thank J.K. Rowling for this, and for the tsunami of paranormal YA books that have followed in the wake of Harry Potter’s wild success.
Yet something about this combined trend unsettles me. Although I don’t feel that the Harry Potter series itself is guilty of this, I do feel that many of its emulators are doing their audiences a disservice.
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Think about your work in progress, and ask yourself, “What’s the worst thing I could do to my protagonists?” Kill all his friends? Push him off a cliff? Make him step on a land mine? Burn his house down? Let him get dumped, loudly, in public? Or maybe just shoot him in the groin?
Now think about what’s the best thing you could do to him, and consider the following. For your book to be successful, you need readers to be rooting for your protagonist. You need readers to be in his corner, cheering him on.
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In my last article I talked about how the careless inclusion of backstory information can ruin the presentation of otherwise compelling characters. This month is about strategies through which you can convey a character’s background without those problems. Best of all, while poor application of backstory undermines your story, careful presentation of backstory can actually enhance your story. Here are four ways to use backstory effectively:
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If you’re my kind of writer, you’ve probably spent hours on understanding who your characters are. You may have worked up your characters’ histories in endless detail. You may know what their first job was, who their first kiss was with, and what it is that they secretly want to be when they grow up. You’ve done it so you can understand what makes these people tick, what their emotional baggage is, and how they’ll respond in any situation.
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