Understanding Your Character’s Point of View
The vast majority of disputes seem to arise from one or both sides being unwilling to acknowledge the validity of the other side’s point of view. There is what they “know” to be “true” based on the depthless wealth of their own experience, and then there is “wrong.” Invariably, people tend to interpret others’ actions not through the lens of common sense but through the lens of what they believe such behavior would mean from them. As in, if something doesn’t immediately make sense to them, then clearly it’s nonsensical. Which is how, historically, disorders like PTSD have been so easily minimized. “I don’t have it,” goes the logic, “therefore you can’t have it, either.”
Which is the basis of the advice to write what you know.
I’ve talked before, in I Look Like This Because I’m A Writer, about how this kind of thinking leads to narrative mistakes. For example, romanticizing poverty. In particular, I discussed an article I’d read where a very clearly adult woman purported to offer expert advice on how children experienced poverty. According to her, they experienced it entirely through the lens of feeling sorry for their martyr mothers. There was no suggestion that either a) they might not have fully grasped that they were poor or b) that they might have experienced the condition with some reference to their own wellbeing. This is a perfect example of how people substitute what they think other people should feel based on nothing more than armchair coaching. And will then, oddly enough, rigorously defend these imaginary points of view.
Wouldn’t want to let the facts intrude.
The thing is, people often have their own stories to tell. Stories they will tell, if you let them. If you can, for example, stop rhapsodizing about being poor long enough to let an actual poor person tell you about their life, then you just might learn something. I, for example, did grow up poor. My childhood, with all its ups and downs, is something that I–as an adult–view as a source of strength. And humor. When people ask me how I got so good at picking berries, the actual honest-to-God answer is that I once spent a summer doing forced labor on a berry farm. Which yes, I really do find funny.
It’s a lot easier to judge people than it is to try to understand them. Too often, we interrupt others’ narratives to judge them–to question whether it’s “okay” that someone who’s experienced something you never have might find it funny, rather than to learn why they do. What kind of coping mechanism that is, and how it might have helped them. And, as writers, we often do the same thing with our characters.
Writing realistic characters means creating multidimensional people and then letting them make choices.
Spend too much time sermonizing, moralizing, and wondering what people “should” do and you’ll end up with a series of very bland, very boring caricatures who are very much the same. Indistinguishable, indeed, one from the other. If that’s what you want, then fine. But the work of bringing real people into the world begins long before you’re ready to set the proverbial pen to paper. It means doing research. Not googling things; real research. Writing a story about someone who’s experienced a particular circumstance? Get out and interview people who’ve been there. Writing about living in a particular place? Get out there and visit.
To create a real person, you have to know enough about that person’s circumstances, and their relationship to those circumstances, to understand what makes them tick. To understand what would and would not be out of character for them. I have a degree in medieval history; I combined that knowledge of, and passion for the subject with my own imagination to create a fantasy version of medieval England. And I populated it with people I understood. In both Isla and Tristan, in The Demon of Darkling Reach, there’s a strong sense of being other. Of not fitting in. In the stand-alone I’m working on now (before I start The Black Prince), there’s some of that same sense of other but in a different format entirely. That book is set in the present day, and is in some ways much darker than The Black Prince Trilogy. In some ways not.
None of the books I’ve written are, I suppose, precisely cheerful. Although I do hope people enjoy them. I hope, too, that they root for the characters and perhaps see something of themselves in those characters. Oddly enough, I knew I’d succeeded–in character creation at least, if not as an author–when the one star reviews started pouring in. People were leaving me terrible reviews because they were mad at my characters, and mad at the choices they were making. And as rough as that was to experience, being the person who created–and loved–the hated character–I had to recognize that they were being treated like real people. People who were capable of deciding for themselves.
Which was precisely what I’d set out to accomplish.
In my books, I write about situations to which I in some way relate. The link may be attenuated, but its there. You’ll never catch me writing a book about a perfectly adjusted person who hails from a perfectly well-adjusted background because, quite honestly, I wouldn’t know where to begin. I write about anger, and struggle, and feminism, and developing your own sense of self, about longing and yearning and risks (and a healthy dose of strange) because that’s what I understand. That’s where I’ve been.
