Understanding Character Depth Through the Lens of Who

I recently started to get caught up on Writing Excuses, Season 20 while commenting into work. Specifically, Episode 5: Lens 1 – Who. The discussion introduces “the lens of who” — which means talking about characters. This is a great refresher on making characters that are multi-dimensional by showing them through different “lenses”. A key take-away is the idea that our characters have different sets of experiences, which should mean if they each described the same think, they most likely would have different takes on the scene or event. 

While I don’t want to spoil the whole episode, there were a couple ideas I latched onto around crafting a character background or back story. The ideas were questions writers should ask and answer about their characters to give them greater depth and context for how they view the world. The questions are:

“What is the lie your character believes about the world?”

And:

“What is the truth your character is afraid to learn?”

These may be related to one another, or completely different, depending on the character, author, and story. If the author knows the answers to these questions, they can craft details that will make the character more real for the reader. Let’s see how I can retroactively answer these for one of my recent characters, without creating story spoilers.

Finn is one of the main characters from Technomancer. While it is never really said in the book, he believes that an intelligent individual of strong character can successfully battle entrenched evil in the government. This is a lie, though it is open to debate, obviously. The truth he is afraid to learn is that the rational rules of science he believes in cannot explain the world he is transported into. He struggles to learn more, observe more, and make his observations fit this worldview. Unfortunately, the things that happen to him do not actually fit into his view of how the world operates. His view does not address the reality of gods and chaos that permeate Elara’s realms., though he continues to try and shoehorn things into a scientific mindset.

I think these two elements come through in the tale, but you readers will have to weigh in and let me know if I’ve succeeded. 

I’ll be adding these questions to my Character Template available for download by subscribers. I encourage you to listen to the podcast as well as subscribe here to get the templates.

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