Character Development: Small Things

It’s such a small thing to have your character pick up the phone and be the one to call. But character development is in the small things.

Your main characters need to be people who do things – not those to whom things are done. (That a huge reason most writing advice discourages the passive voice: it robs the characters of agency.)

Of course you will put your characters through hell. They will react more than act much of the time, but that just makes those small moments of agency all the more important.

In the story I’m revising, my character received a perfectly timed phone call. She’d already figured out this was a man she needed to talk to and then he called her. Synchronicity at its finest. These things happen all the time in reality, but put it on a page and it becomes unbelievable.

In all the drafts, he called her at this point. He may have even had a good, solid reason in one of those drafts, but that was long ago.

Art by Danger Dust

Who am I kidding? I gave him a flimsy excuse to call her because I was being a lazy writer.

Why did I never consider having my main character pick up the phone?

Because I never questioned my assumptions. (Hint: that’s lazy writing.) Questioning assumptions is a whole other post. Look forward to that. In the meantime, please trust me when I say this is hugely important.

So she picks up the phone. She calls him. It’s such a small choice, but it gives her agency. She takes the action. And it tells the reader that she has figured out what he is without relying on exposition.

One comment I received from a few early readers was that despite the bad things that happen to the main character, her path through the story is too easy. Things fall into place for her and make it an easy journey.

While she is a small part of a much larger story, the primary story I’m telling is hers. Events tend to push her around, but when she directs none of that for herself, she becomes boring. Passive.

Just because the larger story pushes her around doesn’t mean she can’t make her own choices and decisions along the way.

Something so small as picking up the phone is still a choice she made. It never ceases to amaze me how the smallest changes can have such a large impact on story and character development.

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