Developing as a Writer
Lesson 3 - Characters
In Week Three we focus on our characters and pay them more attention considering how linked to our structure they are. We re-examine them and how fully-formed they are and how they interact with each other and what’s important to a reader when it comes to your relationship dynamics. We talk dialogue and look at what’s working and what’s not now you have a whole novel on the page and a list of characters. Two examples we focus on are Us and One Day, both by David Nicholls as they are both accessible novels, have been adapted to screen, and with character it also helps to examine what a novelist does across a set of books.
Last week we finished off discussing the importance of reading widely. When it comes to characters, here’s why. This is what I learned from NW by Zadie Smith: At the end of the first part of her novel I’m told that someone living on the next road to central character Lia, was stabbed to death in what a TV news report implies is a gang related incident. The ‘someone’ is named but we’ve never heard this name and the characters are more shocked about its proximity to them than the person themself, as they don’t know them. A few pages later the next part starts and we are introduced to Felix who we now know dies the evening before the Notting Hill Carnival. We then live Felix’s last day with him, and though we had not encounter Felix before, as part two progresses we learn about him, his past, his hopes, his aspirations, so by the time that evening arrives we feel this huge sense of foreboding against the inevitable, hoping the TV news report was wrong, that it was a case of mistaken identity, that the writer has a twist in store to save Felix. Felix may not be a saint, but perhaps that’s why we want him spared. He’s flawed, like us. He’s a messy character. He’s a character that, in a way, feels honest, true to himself, true to all his faults. And as we get to that inevitable end of Felix’s story, we find that Zadie Smith has used that inevitable against us by making us care about Felix so we feel something when events play out.
Re-Examining Our Characters
In the first draft of a novel we have had a first go at doing something incredibly unique and difficult – creating a living, breathing individual in the reader’s mind using only words. However it is in the second and third drafts of our novels that we work out the ways to comprehensively make these characters feel real. The first thing to acknowledge, is that as a fiction writer you have some wonderful tools to do this and let the reader get to know a character in a way that is not possible in real life. In real life we can’t hear a person’s inner monologue – we don’t necessarily know what they think and feel. In fiction, we can. In real life we only get access to what people say and how they behave outwardly – we can’t see what they’re thinking and feeling and what their intentions are. So the novelist really has a unique tool here. It can be useful to make the most, in fiction, of the difference between your character’s external behaviour and what their real thoughts, intentions and views are.
As a novelist, you have a tremendous advantage over the screen-writer because you can TELL the reader what the character is thinking – you can tell the reader about their inner life, about the difference between the way they’re acting and what they’re really feeling. In a screenplay you can only show, but the novelist can do both.
The character that people seem to love most in David Nicholls’ books is Emma in One Day – and so when she dies there’s an emotional response in the reader. But her death was always planned – it was part of the novel’s structure, and it had to happen for the novel to make sense. It was very surprising to David to see the way that readers felt her loss and responded as if she were a real person.
Character and story are absolutely intertwined – you can’t have one without the other, and both need to be carefully planned. It's a fascinating business creating characters – and there are questions you should ask yourself to make sure that the character feels real, tangible, rounded and comprehensible to the reader.
Re-Planning your Characters
The beauty of first drafts is they allow us to take an objective view of our novel and read it from a reader’s perspective. Before you started your novel, your character only existed as an idea, perhaps either in your head or in a notebook. Now you can assess how that character has come to be – does he/she/they work? Do they feel real and rounded? Because it is not a easy thing to do, especially at the first attempt to create a whole, believable identity. Therefore, this is the perfect stage for a writer to think about:
1. Basic facts – You need to work out the character’s background, what their parents did, what education they’ve had, a timeline – the factual information. This needs to be clear in your head – clearer than when you started your draft and acknowledge where the inconsistencies lie as your ideas for your characters may have changed during the creative process of that first draft. Reassess and finalise these facts so you are happy with your character’s background. Names are important – often they are not interchangeable i.e. it can be disconcerting to change them right at the end even if they are they are close to a real person as a name is often so personal to the writer and feels so linked to that character’s personality. I thought about changing the name of my character in Relationship on the Green from Daisy. But no other name would fit. She wasn’t a Jenny, an Emma, an Amy. She was Daisy.
A character’s background can often play an important role in shaping them. How are your characters influenced by their backgrounds and upbringing? What is the relationship between your character’s background and their perceived social class. How does their background weigh in when it comes to their relationships with others? How do your secondary characters’ backgrounds impact on your main character? Underdog stories are full of these dynamics and notice the subtleties in confidence, overdoing things or fitting in when it comes to levels of privilege.
2. Tastes – Think about how they dress, what music they like to listen to, what they watch on television, how they like their hair to be cut.
3. Emotions – How they react in situations of stress or anxiety, how they relax. Their attitudes, hopes and dreams, aims and desires, disappointments and regrets – what’s expressed and what’s unknown about them, and how well they know themselves.
On the original Indie Novella Writing Course we introduced the Character Fact File where you have to answer a whole series of questions for your character – do this again now, and for all your characters and you have to do this persuasively, quickly and confidently.
It’s good to do this type of rigorous research when creating your central characters – and to write it all down. Give your characters a CV – give them a tangible, rounded background so that you know what they did for their sixteenth birthday, you know what they’d choose from an ice-cream van. Ask yourself loads of questions, and answer them. If you don’t know the answers, then your character probably isn’t fully formed, and that could be why you are having trouble building a story around them. You need to know who they are for your story to work.
Take the lead character Douglas, from the novel Us which we explored in the first course, David Nicholls absolutely knew that Douglas loved his wife more than his wife loved him – and that staying with her and keeping the family together was his number one motivation; that he’d do anything for her. David also knew that Douglas wouldn’t be able to say any of this – that along with the love would go an incoherence, a lack of emotional eloquence. This was the root of his character – he was someone full of love that can’t be expressed. That provides the key to unlock the story, as well as forward momentum, and it’s all rooted in character.
Therefore, in your second draft, by re-examining your first draft;
A) know your characters’ intentions – what they want and their inner life. You need to know this not just at the beginning of the story but in each scene as the novel goes on.
B) Know their Motivation: People do things for a reason. Give your characters credible motivation for their actions – this will energise your scenes.
Know your characters’ limitations
As well as thinking about how your characters show who they are through what they do and say, it’s important to think about their limitations – what they can’t do and say. As we said with overdoing things above, sometimes it’s better to focus on what’s missing. Some characters are so extroverted all the time and can’t stop performing and trying to show how clever they are, they don’t have the self-awareness or comfortability within themselves to just be. In contrast, you have characters like Douglas in Us who can’t say what he really feels. Some characters also hide their true feelings behind jokes or barbed remarks and almost feel a self-loathing for doing so.
When you’ve explored your characters’ limitations, you may then find that your story can focus on how they try to overcome the obstacles presented by those very limitations.
Going back and Toning Down your Overwriting
Because we worry so much about a character making sense, we often over-write certain characteristics. With Douglas in Us, David Nicholls wanted to write about someone who was controlling, pedantic and restrictive so in the first draft was so keen to get this all across that that’s all he was. Everything he did and said was an expression of his controlling, neurotic, limited view of the world – and this very quickly becomes boring and off-putting for the reader. In the second draft, the job is to go back over these things – and find ways to work against them. So with Douglas, David had to find ways to make him self-aware – then he could also be funny and attractive, and no longer just the prig of the first draft.
Flaws and Mistakes
Margaret Atwood famously said that the things you demand of a character are not the things you demand of a flatmate. You don’t have to get on with them, and it’s actually their flaws, their mistakes, the things that are most maddening about them that can also be the most interesting. A wholly ‘good’ character, like a wholly happy relationship, isn’t necessarily that engaging for the reader.
Some characters are much more flawed than others and push likeability to its limits. But that isn’t to say that I’d want to soften their edges too much. A certain amount of spikiness and challenge can make a character interesting. Characters don’t have to be wholly likeable, but readers need to be prepared to go on a journey with them through the novel. It becomes a problem only if readers say they wouldn’t want to spend time with the character – that’s when you need to do further work. With characters such as Dexter in One Day, David also shows us their softer sides and their suffering, and gives them the potential to change, and finally some element of redemption.
External Influences on Characters
What barriers can I put in place when it comes to a love story. How am I going to sustain this novel? What is different enough between your characters to keep them apart? Prejudice, class anxiety, infidelities – these are external factors but you also need to consider the qualities of their personalities that keep them apart for much of the story, up until it makes sense for them to get together.
The relationships between characters are specific and unique – they are like characters in and of themselves. The dynamic of a relationship will encourage different aspects of the personality to come to the fore. And if you throw obstacles in front of your characters and their relationships – romantic relationships, but also friendships, parents and children etc. – you are driving story. If everything’s fine and everyone gets on really well, there’s no story. Story comes from the things that go wrong, the mishaps, the failures to connect – whether these are comic or tragic or both.
Have your Characters outgrown your novel
Now you have a completed draft of a novel consider, have your characters outgrown your novel? Should they have grown more? A lot of characters start off as stereotypes but through your novel are brought to life as you write, discovering their own idiosyncrasies. The problem becomes they could no longer fit the story you penned for them and you need to reexamine your plot and storylines and see if it still makes sense for that character or if you need to change the plot in the next draft to better fit these characters whom you start to know better. This happens a lot with main characters. With secondary characters the opposite is often true. While so much work is done on our main character our secondary ones remain as tropes and stereotypes. Therefore real attention may need to be paid to your secondary characters or those characters active in your story which are not your main one. How many character fact files have you completed? Was it just for one main character? How well do you know the other characters?
When working on a second draft you should plot out your main character’s character arc alongside your novel’s story arc. In a really good novel the characters go through something – they’ll be changed by the events of the story. They develop as the story develop. They explore themes. We get to know more about them throughout – both their background and their motivations. They gradually change and in the end they reach some form of resolution. Know what they’re thinking at each stage of the story so that they feel real and rounded and capable of change. But your reader also needs to be able to understand why the character is changing and that the changes are plausible. What external forces are influencing them and causing their change? You should establish what your characters want right from the first pages of your story. This is a great tip when reviewing your opening – do you give us a clue, not only what your story is, but what your character wants more than anything else in this story?
But if only one character goes on this journey and all the other characters stay pretty much unaltered then we’re missing something. You don’t need to write every single character an intricate plot, but do consider what is driving your main cast of characters and how they can move with your main character and reach their own resolutions as your novel concludes.
Revisiting your Dialogue
It isn’t natural speech. Unless you are deliberately going for a verity affect and want to reproduce the umms and ahs and hesitations and overlaps and digressions of everyday speech, it’s best to consider it entirely different. Dialogue often has a heightened operatic quality and it comes most easily when you know what the voices are. When you know and have a clear idea who your characters so as to know their vocabulary and rhythm of such speech. Hence after you complete your first draft. By then you’ll know your characters and their voices in your head and what they will and won’t say.
Therefore take you dialogue and say it out loud. Do the voices, like an audiobook. This will help you hear what’s jarring and when people are speaking too much.
Remember, dialogue rarely needs more than He said, She said, They said and anything more usually gets in the way. Keep it simple when you absolutely need to clarify who is speaking.
Look at how the dialogue looks on the page and the energy it represents. Short sentences vs blocks of text. Which suit the scene.
Also think which activities complement you dialogue. People rarely sit down and talk. Choose a setting or action which complements the mood of the dialogue or something that gets in the way and causes an extra strain or tension. Try not to sit your characters down at a table simply talking, think about where you can put them, what you can give them to do.
Also watch what is said, if the information you are trying to impart is too on the nose that it becomes exposition.
Masterclass and Writing Exercise
A key area from last week's discussion was reading widely as a writer. After all, agents are trying to second guess what a publisher is looking for and a publisher is second guessing what a reader is looking for. Therefore, we are delighted to bring you a Masterclass with Reviewer for The Spectator and The Guardian, as well as the founder of Emily's Walking Book Club and the charity Book Banks, Emily Rhodes. To have such an influencial reviewer provide insight into what a reader is looking for in a novel is such a coup and we were delighted to secure Emily's time. Emily really focuses on what a novel does well, what excites her about the story and the prose, what works, and uses examples from some of her 2024 reviews such as Headshot by Rita Bullwinkel and The Echoes by Evie Wyld to illustrate how as a reviewer and a reader you can tell the books which are going to thrive and only home in on why they are such a delight to read.
Writing Exercise
For the writing exercise this week, we keep things focused on our novel. In the first writing course we asked you to write a tense scene featuring two of your characters. Rather than repeat that, we'd like you to write three paragraphs about three of your characters. Delve into your Fact File, give us a brief about who they are and then let us know what motivates them and what they're purpose is in the story. What do they want to achieve? How do you see them growing? The reason we ask you to do this three times is because novels should rarely focus on one character, but sometimes as a writer we end up writing one character stronger than others. Here, try to consider how full formed two of your other characters are too.