The Indie Novella Writing Course
Lesson 4 - Characters
In Lesson 3 we briefly discussed the concept of the unreliable narrator – the notion that the novel’s narrator is deliberately economical with truth because they either have something to hide or are avoiding something. We see the world the way one character and one character only wants us to see it. Some authors go even further, depicting characters deliberately reassessing their perspectives to lessen the aspects of their lives which they themselves find disappointing, as a coping mechanism, or contradicting themselves for one reason or another. This playing with narrative point of view says so much about both characterization and storytelling. How we mould our main character shapes our narrative, and the facets of our other characters shape what information we are giving our reader.
When it comes to deciding which narrative perspective to write a novel, Kazuo Ishiguro says he auditions all his characters before deciding which to make the first person narrator. A detective story written from the perspective of the killer is a very different story compared to that same story told from the detective’s point of view. The choice you as a writer make about who your narrator is will greatly influence how the story comes across. Adopting a different point of view to tell the story can produce a completely different kind of story, with a different tone and effect, from the same events.
What a Character should be
I know we say there are no rules when it comes to writing, but when it comes to character, it helps to remember one thing – Every character has a vital part to play.
Readers wants to read about interesting people. They want larger than life characters. They want a character they will remember. That is not to say a writer’s job is not to make every single character so unbelievable they jar and together seem implausible, but rather to allow the readers imaginations to fly.
The difference between real life and a novel is that a novel resolves events into a pattern, usually with a strong sense of cause and consequence. Real life moves continuously with its ebbs and flows and certain conflicts go on unconfronted or evaporate in an underwhelming way. In a novel, however, something happens. Actions occur and produce outcomes and further actions. And we reach a conclusion, in most cases anyway. And it is the same with characters – in a novel your characters will respond to conflict. They pounce into action. Things don’t happen to them passively. It is much more satisfying to see them play an active role in events.
Creating memorable, engaging characters is an essential part of the art of creative writing and exaggeration is an essential tool. Characters can be created from just a handful of details which make them unique in the eye of the reader. Key features to stimulate character development include: physical appearance or quirks, clothing and accessories, attitude, poses or gestures, how they speak or sound, or even how they smell. Small details like if they have bad breath can help create your character vividly and help tell a story.
In Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl, the tarnished hero, Nick, describes himself as having a villainous chin which makes him not only a bit difficult to believe, but also hints at the central conflict of the novel. A familiar example regarding clothing is The Devil Wears Prada where Andrea’s character arc closely follows her wardrobe choices. Author, Simon Ings, told students at Creative Brown Creative that a great tip to subtly introduce physical attributes – i.e. not to begin a novel with ‘I am John, six-foot tall, in my mid-twenties and from Epsom’ – is to introduce a character by describing how they’ve changed. Try telling the reader that your hero has grown fatter, thinner, or sadder ‘than before’. By keeping referencing change in you character’s appearance, you also remind the reader who the character is and what actions/conflicts they are involved in. Don’t worry about being polite - create written portraits with embellished features as you work on creating distinctive characters.
Regarding how your character sounds, a lot of fun can be had with words such as breathy, croaky, smoky, nasal, fragile/brittle, plummy (posh). The range of the character’s vocabulary – limited, verbose, ostentatious – also helps to indicate information regarding their attitude, their education, political view and how they handle personal relationships. Adjectives like this are helpful, but remember to show not tell. Consider Hemingway’s A Farewell To Arms and Hemingway’s seemingly constant use of the phrase “You Goddamn son of bitch!” when his lead character converses with his Italian counterpart, or Holden Caulfield’s many catchphrases in A Catcher in the Rye. Giving your character their own signature through a catchphrase they use, or particular language and how they use, can help distinguish their dialogue and to own it in unforgettable ways.
It is also worth discussing how to tackle the challenge of incorporating dialects or accents. We can all point to great examples of novels written with unusual or phonetic spellings and grammatical style – think The Shipping News or The Road or Trainspotting or A Brief History of Seven Killings – however also consider how these are the exception to the rule. There is a tightrope between putting in a few clues to a character being upper-class verses cockney and potentially writing something that is difficult to read. Let your choice of language do the work above all, rather than a phonetic spelling. Consider J.K. Rowling and the Harry Potter novels. There are constant little clues in the dialogue differentiating the many characters while always keeping the discourse readable. If you are looking to write the whole novel in a particular dialogue with phonetic-type spelling then this is more a question of style and if you do it consistently then should not be discouraged – the importance is keeping the consistency, and developing a way that suits your style and character, rather than appears to simplify or objectify a particular accent.
Tip: Create a Character Fact File with a list of questions about your character. This can start with the simple and move to the more complex: what colour eyes do they have? How tall are they? What are their hobbies? What political parties do they vote for? Do they have any siblings? Where did they grow up? What is their favourite song and film? What would be the title of their autobiography? These are just a few questions. A fact file should have close to 40 questions if not more to really hone in on who your character is. You could alternatively create a mood board with a series of images, objects or quotes which represent your character and say something regarding their personality. A lot of these facts may not show up on the page, but will shape what the character says and how they behave.
The Arc – Change/Development in Character
Wallace Stevens once defined fiction as: 'It must change'. This is most applicable to its characters, as it is the arc of their experience which we follow. We read a novel because something happens to our protagonists and they go on some form of journey, be it an actual journey as in The Alchemist or a coming-of-age journey in Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye or a journey of self-discovery with Julian Barnes’s The Sense of An Ending, i.e. literally, figuratively, or emotionally. In David Nicholl’s Us Douglas and his family take a trip across multiple European countries but the real journey in the novel is Douglas’s, from being the uptight stickler who is desperately trying to keep his marriage together, to the man who can rekindle the relationships he has neglected.
Think about the conflict between consistency and deliberate inconsistency in your characters. Think about how they change and develop over your novel. By charting this out over your novel’s timeline, you will get a sense of how your characters develop and what change your reader should see. Essentially, you will have what is termed a character arc. In literature these stories of a character’s journey, whether interior, exterior, or both, are probably the most powerful stories – we read to see characters grow, flourish and overcome adversity. By the end of your novel, where should your characters be as compared to where they were at the start?
In addition, perhaps a little counter-intuitively, consider the importance of not having a character change over the novel. Fitzgerald’s second novel, The Beautiful and the Damned, is a somewhat semi-autobiographical piece about a character falling further and further into alcoholism. A reader could say this was a journey and the character did change, falling further and further, however it can also be argued that the character’s inability to change was the novel’s most captivating element – the novel explores weaknesses he never overcame, and this is the novel’s central conflict – a bitter pill for the reader to swallow and a powerful emotional journey for the reader.
This notion of the arc can also be applied to secondary characters. Their consistency, or their inability to change, can be used to accentuates the arc of change in the protagonist.
Creating Active Characters
Hemingway defined the courage he saw in wartime as ‘grace under pressure’. By forcing your character into difficult situations, it is then that you truly see who they are. In The Beautiful and the Damned we see that under pressure, the hero falls short. In Harry Potter, we see that under pressure Harry and co. become the heroes. It is our characters’ actions and decisions which reveal the most about them. Good character building hence focuses on how your characters act.
Active characters are central to any novel. It is through making your characters act that your novel develops structure, intrigue and conflict, and your characters themselves develop their traits, personalities, motives and even backstory. However, making a character act is by its nature at odds with reality. We said in earlier lessons, fiction resolves the mess of reality, and in reality people tend to avoid conflict. Making your character both feel and sound believable and not avoid conflict, but step up to great drama, is the fundamental contradiction of writing. When done well, this produces a marriage full of engaging tension which creates a great novel.
Making a character act is very much linked to conflict and the rules you set out in your ‘world building’. ‘World building’ is a key part of science fiction writing. Take The Hunger Games. The world has been created where people live in subjugation, only for a heroine to arise out of the games and inspire revolution. The world built by the author hence creates an opportunity for the character to act. And ‘world building’ does not need to be limited to science fiction. In fiction we perhaps call it ‘scene setting’ but the same principle applies – a set of events is created which forces an otherwise ordinary character to do the extraordinary. The more apparent or demanding the test facing your character(s), the more challenging it will be for them to confront it and act.
Tips of making characters act:
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Wants – Give your character(s) a want or desire. Again, take our featured novels The Sense of an Ending and Swimming Home. The Sense of an Ending is fundementally the story of one character, the narrator, wanting answers. He has been set a mystery from his past and he wants to find out the truth. Swimming Home on the other hand is a story where the central character is not entirely obvious so each character the narrator embodies has their own wants which may or may not be contrary to the others
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Obstacles, difficulty and adversity – these do not need to be insurmountable forces. In The Sense of an Ending the obstacle is simply the protagonist not being told the full story no matter the efforts he goes to track down different parties he hopes will shed light on the matter.
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What do you need to add to the story, to get your character to face their obstacle rather than avoid the hassle like a real person would? Consider again The Alchemist: what makes an Andalusian shepherd boy give up the only life he has ever known for the uncertainty and unknown he has only seen in a dream? Put simply, show why your characters are not able to avoid the nonsensical journey you, the author, has plotted, but are compelled to step up to the obstacles ahead.
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Escalating the actions, creating reversals – by adding your backstory or taking the story forward at each obstacle, the story is revealed and your plot moves in line with the character arc. Stephen King famously prefers character sketches to plans as moving from wants to difficulties gets the characters moving and producing action.
As a character experiences changes of feelings, chapter after chapter, scene after scene, the reader will want to read on and follow that change.
Creating a Protagonist
Creating a protagonist – and an antagonist – is as applicable for non-fiction as it is for fiction. The story of your life, or someone else’s, will have a protagonist with whom the reader can identify.
Does your main character have to be likeable? Or relatable?
No. Not necessarily. Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl is the story of two unreliable narrators, neither of which are likeable. It may be that we sympathise with Nick as he has been set up for murder, however it is also revealed that he has been having an affair with one of his students. Gillian Flynn herself raised concerns that she was not convinced the novel would be taken on by her publisher due to both characters being so flawed. But interestingly, what readers often want are characters who hold their attention. Characters who when put in a state of conflict will initially demonstrate the same emotions as them, but may be compelling while not necessarily likeable. Consider detective stories and crime novels. If the protagonist simply follows procedure to the letter as they point towards an obvious criminal, then what appeal is there for the reader? The characters’ dilemmas and self-questioning, the flipping from one possible suspect to another, the red herrings that point to one possible villain and wrongfoot the reader as to who it really is, all this creates suspense and has the reader reading on. The role of a protagonist is, likeable or not likeable, to take the reader on a journey through self-discovery and character change – and this will add interest and layers to the plot.
Protagonists and conflict go hand in hand. As Johnny Geller explained in his TEDx Talk, the cat sat on the mat is not a story. The cat sat on the dog’s mat is. The success of the Harry Potter novels can be argued to stem from the series of conflicts Harry faces – the Dursleys, Professor Snape, the Mirror of Erisad, Slytherin House – which makes him become the most recognizable protagonist in twenty-first century literature. Therefore, as described above, what makes a protagonist, rather than charm, wit or sharp dialogues, is a series of events so enthralling, that neither character nor reader can walk away.
Tips for Protagonists:
Reciprocity. What does your protagonist care about? By giving your character something they care about, you make them less self-involved. Your character cares about something other than themselves, hence the reader will care about your character. Consider Eleanor Oliphant. The character is initially penned as self-isolated, apparently by choice. However, it is when she meets and aids an elderly man that we see this pent-up caring side to Eleanor. Also, right at the start of the novel we learn Eleanor has a cat, which subtly shows her caring side.
Aptitude. As said above, readers enjoy larger than life characters, hence give your character a unique ability the makes them stand out. It does not need to be a superpower; it could just be a love of cooking or a gift for charcoal sketches. However, what it subtly does is make the reader think that by embodying this character they will also take on this skill, and if they are interested in this skill, they will likely be interested in the character. Hemingway was famous for writing about bull fighting, fishing and, of course, writing (well, plus war and numerous other things…). Therefore, when reading The Sun Also Rises, The Old Man and The Sea, or Death in the Afternoon the reader comes away almost believing they too can fight a bull or gut a fish.
Lord Voldemort
To quote Andrew Scott’s Moriarty in the television series Sherlock, ‘every fairy tale needs a good old-fashioned villain’. Or antagonist, as they are otherwise called. As discussed to above in our Harry Potter example, sometimes there can be more than one antagonist, and sometimes the antagonist may not be entirely obvious, or even a person – essentially the role of the antagonist is to challenge the protagonist. Therefore, the antagonist may not even be remotely villainous.
Consider coming of age novels. The antagonist may be the well-intentioned parental figure who tries to prevent the protagonist sneaking out of the house to do something stupid. At the beginning of The Notebook, if Noah is the protagonist in his pursuit of Allie, then would not Allie be the antagonist in preventing him achieving what he wants?
Identify who is standing in your protagonist’s way in order to give richness to the story about what they want and how they get it. If conflict is a key driver in fleshing out a protagonist then giving your antagonist more of a leading role only enhances your story.
Ask An Expert
What do you think makes a compelling character?
I love a character who stands out as someone you haven’t met before. But while not necessarily being relatable – as in you agree with them – you feel taken by them. I have a sleuthing series with a character called Kit Goddard who is a Welsh social worker who grew up in the care system, and part of me thought, social worker, care system, how am I going to sell that? But the character is so great, you just fall in love with her. And her name is brilliant – names are similar to what I said about titles – then you move on and get to know her, and everyone I know who has come across that character just loves her because she’s got a sense of humour, she’s a bit subversive, she’s been through a lot, and she’s on the side of the good and wants to get justice. She’s on a mission to root out what’s gone wrong in the cases that she deals with, but she’s not at all virtue signalling or lacking in humour. So she is a brilliant character.
Kamil and Anjoli in Ajay Chowdhury‘s crime series are brilliant and something a bit different. The main character is a Kolkata detective working as a waiter in a curry house in London and sleuths his way into the Met. It’s brilliant – you’ve got policing, you’ve got cross-cultural, you’ve got the cooking and it’s a lively world that opens the doors on a lot of different things.
I love Jackson Lamb in the Slough House books that are now on Apple TV. Mick Herron is a subversive writer who has absorbed a lot of classic crime, but he does it in a really funny way that keeps you on your toes.
Eleanor Oliphant was a brilliantly executed character, a really great marriage of plot, voice and character, and all three moving beautifully together. Olive Kitteridge is also really brilliant character, and then Lessons in Chemistry has a great character.
And I’ll just mention an author of mine I’m going to go out with in September, Diana McCaulay. When I opened her manuscript and read, and I paraphrase, 'The night that she woke up and knew that the stones in her house had started to move, Miss Pauline knew that she would die before her 100th birthday.’ It is just brilliant because you get the sense that she’s in this house, she’s in this spooky situation, and she’s ninety-nine years old, and a radical reckoning is going to happen. The whole story is carried together beautifully with the voice, and together with the character.
How do you feel about characters being likeable or relatable? Is this something that is necessary?
I think likeability comes with a flaw. You can like people who aren’t conventionally likeable and that is how it works in fiction. You definitely don’t have to like them to be interested in them, but truly dislikeable characters are definitely a bit tricky and it’s probably quite a common editorial reaction to pull back the writer if the character is becoming truly dislikeable. But as true to life, nobody is going to be fully good, so a character who is flawed and struggling and doesn’t act in the most commendable way is often a character you can really like and find interesting.
You mentioned problems with structure coming from having too many characters. What would your advice be for writers who may have too many characters? How do you determine which are the most important?
Think of the central conflicts of the novel, what is the question that you’re trying to answer and who carries the question. Who is exploring that question and who is the best person to unfold that story? Alex Marwood has a really interesting observation on that, in that she used to think that action led character, but actually character leads action much more. I think it is such a marriage in that character is action and action is character. So you really need to think about who is essential and who is driving it. And just cut those who don’t. It’s hard, but cut them, put them in a file and save them, and they can come in later in your writing career if needed.
Weekly Writing Exercise
The key to making a character change is something happens to them to drive their behaviour. Characters in novels act the opposite to people to real life – Characters in novels have to embrace conflict.
ACTION drives CHARACTER or does CHARACTER drive ACTION? Are your characters reactive to an external force i.e. is it the scenario which kicks them into life? Or are they seeking out conflict and put themselves into scenarios where action is sure to follow?
Therefore, this week we are asking you to first have a go at completing your own Character Fact File and then drop your character into the midst of the action. Write a short scene based on one of the following scenarios:
1) You character gets stood up
OR
2) Your character discovers a dead body
Again, no need for anything too long, just 300 to 400 words. And please do let us know how you get on.