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Lastest BLOG –> “The Soul of Your Story: How to Craft Memorable Characters for Your Novels.”
By Floyd Largent
Modern readers don’t have time for mediocre novels. They want to revel in the printed word—to lose themselves in ways they can’t in other forms of entertainment, no matter how sublime. Their imaginations reign supreme while unchained inside a book. As a writer, especially a novelist, you provide the primordial material from which their dreams are made.
This requires facility with description, plot, theme, setting, manuscript mechanics like formatting and self-editing, and more. However, all these elements act only as a framework within which the storyline occurs and pale compared to the ability to create discrete, memorable characters. Indeed, your characters are more important than any single structural element of a story, arguably more so than all combined. Not all your key characters have to be lovable—in some cases, they shouldn’t be—but they should leave a lasting impression on the reader. The more distinctive they are, the better. If your characters fall flat, you’ve failed to achieve their story’s potential.
How do you avoid this fate? By making your characters as real and multilayered as you possibly can, spinning them into three dimensions, and then rounding them out with delicate touches of inspiration.
Character Actors: For a few of us, creating naturally rounded characters is second nature. For the rest, character development can be like bathing a cat, and we must always be mindful of the rules. So be it.
What are those rules, then? First, do as James Patterson suggests: Be the character. Slip into their skin and decide how they would feel and react in their current situation. You’re different people with different histories, so they don’t have to reflect your feelings or beliefs or do the same things you would. To pull that off, you must know your characters inside and out from every angle you can imagine. You should know who they are and why they act as they do. What defines them? What happened during their childhood that forces them to react a certain way now? What’s their moral character? What are their vices and virtues, and what are their life goals?
You should know and understand all this at a visceral level. Even if it never appears in your novel, everything in a character’s background informs what they do and how they’ll react. Their psychology, I would argue, is more important than the character’s physical appearance. Why bother describing them in detail unless something about them stands out and impacts the storyline, like Cyrano de Bergerac’s nose in Rostand’s novel?
The Mental Movie: When someone reads your story, you want them to convert it into a kind of film in their mind’s eye. Have you ever gotten so deep in “the zone” while reading a story that you forgot you were reading? I have. When I first read David Edding’s The Mallorean, there were times when I felt like I was viewing the action directly rather than reading it. I call this “transparent writing.” The characters take over, and everything else gets out of the way of the action. When this occurs, the author has created their characters so well and put them into play so perfectly that we’re left in awe, eager to watch what they’re doing until suddenly it’s over, and we have to say goodbye to our new friends.
And some, at least, should be the reader’s friends by the end. One of the things the best characters do is engage your sense of empathy: you understand them, even if you don’t like them. But no matter how nasty they may be, you may want them anyway. Some people actually cheer for Hannibal Lecter. Jay Gatsby, Severus Snape, and Batman are famous literary antiheroes who are sometimes hard to like—but we mostly do. The (aptly) self-named Murderbot, the sentient android MC who lives in Martha Wells’ Murderbot Diaries, is rather endearing. Jeff Lindsey’s Dexter can be, too, depending on how tolerant you are of a serial killer of serial killers.
Another way to shape a memorable character is to craft their description so that the reader recreates them so vividly that it’s like they’re reading your mind. This happened to me with the Lord of the Rings scene in which Gollum fished at the Forbidden Pool and sang his silly fish song. I remember being struck by that scene every time I read it before the release of the Peter Jackson movies because that “so juicy sweet!” rounded out the character so well. I could imagine how the song would sound in Gollum’s cracked little voice. I was shocked when I saw Jackson’s vision of the scene, almost precisely what I’d dreamt up. Tolkien’s prose provoked very similar responses in both of us.
The Balancing Act: Gollum himself illustrates the value of an excellent character. Three-dimensional characters allow us to suspend our disbelief because they have multiple layers, which the artist builds up like the most realistic papier-mâché, creating a sense of depth. Their style is unique in the story where they appear; they act differently from the rest, communicate differently, have a different look, or hold unique secrets. In part, one way to achieve this is to draw character elements from life. Does your Texan friend say “ain’t” occasionally or use the term “you’ll” when speaking to multiple people at once? Try adding verbal quirks like that to a character, or, just as effectively, make him speak the most proper of the King’s English.
And keep in mind that no one is perfectly black and white; even Gollum is some shade of gray. Maintain a level of balance while creating each character. You might make them a little off-center, even odd. Maybe your character is afflicted with OCD, which makes him question every little action. Perhaps they like Dr. Who conventions or Mini Coopers (I swear I did not make that up) to the point that it interferes with other aspects of their life. Maybe they’re on the autism spectrum (hello, Sheldon Cooper). Even simple habits can help bring life to an otherwise drab character. Perhaps he hates cigarette smoke, or she constantly dips snuff (didn’t make up that one, either).
And few characters are purely saints or sinners; it’s just easiest to portray them that way. But that rolls back around to the forgettable. So give even your good guys flaws. In one of his lesser-known Middle Earth books, J.R.R. Tolkien has a character dismissing Legolas, the heroic elf who starred in Lord of the Rings, as an unimpressive wastrel when he was younger.
To quote Whitman, the best characters contain multitudes and may contradict themselves, surprising the reader. Capitalize on that.
TL;DR: Whether main or secondary, your key characters are the collective soul of your story, the beating heart of their shared reality. Everything else is just window dressing.