Are Your Characters Realistic?

Vaughn Hardacker here: One of the things that will turn me off from a book is Tom Swift-style characters, you know, the hero who excels at everything they have ever done. For example, the Great Leslie Gallant is the character of the Warner Brothers’ 1965 movie, THE GREAT RACE. The movie is one of my all-time favorites and a great satire. However, the characters are, by intent, shallow. Tony Curtis as Great Leslie is the protagonist, and Jack Lemmon is Professor Fate Leslie’s nemesis and antagonist. Are satirical illustrations of the heroes and villains of silent films. The problem is they are one-dimensional (albeit, I believe, intentionally so).

We writers must never forget that people are not one or even two-dimensional. They are multi-faceted.  They have hopes and fears, hates, likes, and failures.  Yet, we tend to focus on one or two dominant traits when considering their personalities.  We describe someone we know to another person as “He’s the pushy one.”  Or “She’s so sweet but a bit ditsy.”  It’s what, in our minds, makes these people individuals to us. So, too, the characters we write must be multi-faceted.  When we write them as such, they blend into one another with no personality distinctions.  Their physical attributes differ, but you could probably swap around and notice little difference.  The most recent rejection letter says, “Your characters are cookie-cutter.”  Of course, in your mind, you (as the writer) see all these “people” as distinct. Remember the way we describe people?  Define your characters the same way.  Give your hero two or three traits.  That’s all.  Give him two good and one bad (or two bad and one good, if your character is evil).  Lesser characters get fewer traits.

2023

In my most recent novel, my protagonist is a retired hitman (which I believe is an oxymoron) who is moral in that he has strict rules about whether he will or will not hit a particular target (a good thing) and can be loyal (another good thing). Still, when he feels that he’s been taken advantage of, he’s brutal (bad).  My antagonist, by necessity, is almost the opposite: arrogant (bad) and bereft of any semblance of ethics or behavior (bad), which makes him a bully.  I try to make all of my writing character-driven (we have to, after all, virtually every plot today is derived from Shakespeare), so even though there’s a “bad guy” in my Bouchard and Houston novels, one of my readers’ favorite characters is an anti-hero. Jimmy O is a

2015

protagonist who could easily be the antagonist.  However, as interesting as many of my readers have found him, he’s a supporting character (they get only two traits; in Jimmy O’s case, he can be a brutal and violent mobster while, on the other hand, he uses that trait to help people less fortunate than he). A member of one of my writing groups said he is a gangster with morals.

It’s important to remember that sometimes stories change as we write them.  A minor character (Jimmy O) could suddenly become important and move into a supporting character role.  If this happens, give that character one more trait.  But only one; you don’t want to interfere with the importance of the primary characters. Likewise, a supporting character may fall back to supporting status.  In that case, focus on just one of his chosen traits. The most important thing to remember is your character’s role in the story … does his or her presence move the story forward?  If you don’t know that, your characters will have too many traits, and once again, they’ll become cookie-cutter people with different roles.