Dramatis Personae: Creating Characters

This is the first of my panels at Archon, so here are my thoughts about this, informed by roughly ten million similar questions on Quora, in the general genre

Breaking in as a New Author or Novelist: How do you create compelling characters in fiction?

What are some effective ways to make readers quickly care about characters?

What are some good techniques to get readers to care about a character?

How can I make the relationship / love story between my main characters feel genuine and authentic?

I find this sort of question difficult to answer, because fundamentally, the answer is:

A) By being a good writer.

B) … … … …

Sorry, there is no (B).

Either you’re good at characterization and good at developing relationships between your characters, or you aren’t. If you aren’t, then you will either try to improve your skills in this area, or you won’t. And improving your skills means actually writing stories, not asking for advice, because advice such as:

Add more chemistry to the banter between the characters.

Is totally pointless. Either you’re good at dialogue or you aren’t. Either you understand that witty banter isn’t the same thing as meaningful dialogue or you don’t. Either you’re capable of adding chemistry to the relationship or you aren’t.

Advice such as:

Give them shared in-jokes, a shared history, and put them together on one side of a conflict against a common opponent or dangerous situation.

Won’t help in any way unless you can make the characters come to life on the page, which has nothing to do with ANY of that. This is why trying to write a successful novel by checking off boxes on a checklist, such as

Tragic backstory, check

Common enemy, check

Shared history, check

Witty banter, check

will not and cannot work. NONE of that will EVER make a single reader care about your characters. Either you have the actual skill to write characters that readers DO care about, or you don’t have that skill. If you don’t, you will either try to develop that skill or you’ll try to find an easy button that will let you magically become a skilled writer without developing the skill, and there is no easy button.

You can’t just say, Here you go, look, a complicated character! and insist the reader see the character you have in your head. You have to put that character actually on the page, and that takes skill.

Therefore, I have different advice that has nothing whatsoever to do with checklists. Here it is, for what it’s worth:

Go read ten books with relationships that work FOR YOU. Notice what YOU like in characters, and I bet that more than likely what you prefer is characters who are a little bit “more” rather than characters who are realistic. More witty, more intelligent, quicker-thinking, kinder, more generous, braver, more self-sacrificing, more active, more decisive, more heroic. Villains who are more villainous, too. If that’s what you like, notice that. If you like male leads who are reminisecent of the heroic tradition, but with a bit more internal life, notice that and take a stab at writing that kind of character yourself.

Then write another novel. Try to make it better — try to write a novel you really love yourself. And don’t shy away from difficult things. If you want to try something challenging, such as separating the pov and protagonist roles, go for it. If you want six pov characters in a braided narrative, go for it. If you want to try compressing time and having your character start off as a five-year-old tot, go for it. If you want to try having one of your characters have a truly awful childhood, or be a piano prodigy, or be a natural-born military genius, or be an alien, go for it. You can’t learn to write novels with good characters who come to life on the page without trying to do exactly that, so aim to do it and try to do it and write some novels.

After three or four — or even in your very first novel if you’ve got a knack for characterization — you’ll probably be pretty good at characterization, because this is how you get good at everything in writing — by writing, and by trying to do it better.

And some authors DO have a knack for characterization, so maybe you will, and in that case, advice that everybody starts off with flat characters and has to work on making them rounded and lively is not true and could be harmful.

FINE, one piece of advice:

You can’t develop the relationships without developing the relationships. Slow down the plot and put time into developing the relationships, or they will not develop. The current plot-plot-plot, speed it up, full speed ahead thing will destroy your ability to build the characters and the world around the characters. If you want to build deep relationships in your novels, then get your mind off the plot and put it where it belongs: on the characters and their relationships.

It’s true the relationship stuff happens around and during the events of the plot. But the more emphasis you put on breakneck speed, the more you reduce the depth of the relationships. You only get one: speed or depth. Therefore, pick one.

Having said THAT, you can of course develop characters efficiently and sort of hint at the characters in a breakneck plot. I’ve done that occasionally (No Foreign Sky; Eight Doors from Dawn to Midnight). Every single line the characters speak or think, every feeling they have, had better be meaningful if you’re going to try that, because they aren’t going to get a lot of lines, thoughts, or feelings as they whoosh through the plot. If they’re hit by one crisis after another in the middle of their meaningful conversations, that obviously reduces the time spent in those meaningful conversations.

It takes more skill, not less, to do adequate characterization combined with a breakneck plot — and no matter how skilled you are, you will have to give up some depth of characterization in order to speed up the plot. I don’t mean you’ll be giving up angst. I hate angst as both a reader and a writer. I mean you’ll be giving up emotional depth of every kind.

This is a legitimate trade. Readers can be fine with this either way. As you all know, I’ve done a lot more character study types of novels than breakneck plot-forward stories. They spring to mind immediately, most particularly. The Year’s Midnight and Shines Now, plus some of the books in the Tuyo series, especially Nikoles and Tano.

Or you can balance plot and character and do both adventure and character, which is mostly how it works in SFF, for me as well as most other authors. But I think most authors tend to put more emphasis on one or the other, and for me, it’s usually character plus plot, rather than plot plus character. That means, for me, the plot unrolls the way it does solely because the characters are the kinds of people they are. Character drives plot.

The bottom line is that you can’t do character without doing character, you can’t build relationships without building relationships, and you can’t do either by checking off “have character pet a puppy in chapter two” and then going on to “insert intimate moment in chapter four.” Engaging, lively characters arise from voice, meaning style, attitudes, assumptions, predispositions, and actions, plus a sense that the character is a real person. Creating that is a matter of skill and art, not checklists, formulas, or, heaven help us, character bibles filled with notes about the character’s childhoods pets and favorite flavors of ice cream.

So that’s my take on that. Here’s the tl;dr version:

–Read enough books that you know what YOU like in terms of characters and relationships.

–Write books YOU would like to read, featuring characters and relationships YOU like.

–Be aware that each character should have a distinctive voice, which includes a lot more than style, and hold each character in your head as a real individual person. (I don’t know how to put it better than that.)

–Take your time and develop the relationships in a world that really exists on the page.

–Don’t ask for advice about how to do it. Take a stab at actually doing it, refer to real books to see how everything is really done, and see how it goes.

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