Hello! I absolutely love all your characters and how real they feel. What advice do you have for developing realistic characters, especially when some feel underdeveloped compared to others?
Dear zee-the-nerd,
I think it’s about salient noise.
I got this ask a few days ago, and I’ve been thinking about it on and off ever since, because even though I’ve talked a lot about my writing process and how I build characters from real-life people, I’ve never really talked about how my writing, art, and music are all the same in my head. There is an overlying filter/ principle/ law that directs the way I write characters and the way I compose songs and the way I decide what to put in the background of an art piece, and I knew that if I could explain that, I could explain why building a character doesn’t feel like a different skillset than building a world for a new novel or deciding what color blue to use in a portrait of a horse or whether to put hand-claps in the background of a piece of music. The issue is that I’ve never really figured out how to practically describe it. And I’ve never been sure it would be useful to anyone else even if I did.
But today I was sitting down to work and I looked out of my office to where the morning light was illuminating a piece of furniture in the entry, and a way to lay out my thought process hit me. The jury’s out on whether or not it’ll be useful to anyone else. But I’m going to give it a go.
I’m sorry, this is gonna be abstract.
Here’s a picture of what I just saw:
Let this image serve as an extended visual metaphor. I very much like the view from my office. I think it’s interesting and attractive. If you don’t, this might not make sense.
Ok, let’s make a metaphor.
All of my creative pursuits begin with a real-life thing that piques my interest. The crudest form of my art will involve me directly copying this object. I’m not an artist at this stage. I’m a forger. I’m merely trying to objectively copy a simple, truthful likeness.
This part is difficult: fraught with technical skill. I spent years teaching myself how to draw things exactly as I saw them:
Years teaching myself to write a person exactly as I thought they were. To copy the precise style another musician achieved with their harp or bagpipes or whatever I was playing at the time. Because of subjectivity, it’s a tricky thing, this artless forgery. Everything I saw, heard, and experienced came through the corrupting lens of my mind. I’d forge a new verse of a traditional song for our band, but the style would be affected by my modern understanding of scale. I’d draw glass, but I’d get it wrong because my brain kept shouting that it was supposed to be invisible even though my eyes knew better. I’d steal siblings for my characters and get them wrong because I’d misunderstand and simplify motivations.
Teaching myself objectivity — basic forgery, the elimination of bias, the non-negotiable skill of using pigments and words — that involved learning the technical tools of each trade.
Back to the bench outside my office.
Once I became a forger of all sorts, I had the skills to recreate the bench in whatever media I was working in. Thievery. Technically impressive. Technically correct. Technically objective.
This is not art: this is fact.
Now, we all remember that we’re in MetaphorLand, right? Do I need to explain that the bench does not really mean “a bench”? It is the subject of whatever I’m creating.
This is where salient noise comes in.
From that objective seed, that tiny bit of forged reality, I start to complicate. Every time I add something to my creation that is not exactly like real life, I’m making an intentional subjective decision: that’s the art of it. Every time I choose a color that the original subject didn’t feature (a blue horse), or a hobby the person didn’t have (hunting for Welsh kings), an instrument that wasn’t available at the time of a traditional tune’s original composition, I’m building a new and subjective thing.
Artful forgery means not merely copying but creating something that seems like it could be real, even though it’s not. That means adding in as much detail as you need to convince your viewer that the thing they’re looking at could exist somewhere else. Adding in salient noise. The right amount of backstory and surface detail to suggest reality.
Here’s that photo again.
A technical copy of that bench would be a skillful wonder. But that’s not what makes the view out of my office appealing to me. The bench is clearly the center stage, but the noise around it is what makes the photo interesting. The light across the bench is a complicating factor — an aspect of reality that suggests a sunny world outside the room. The violin case beneath the bench holds the promise of a backstory. The painting above it sets the mood and tells you what sort of person might sit on that bench. In the corner of the photo we see a hint of a complicated life: is that a music room? Maybe so — look, there’s a piano, a guitar rack. A set of bagpipes in a case behind the piano, but out of focus, not the point of the photograph. Photos on the wall, telling us that there is more to this life than we can easily see in one glimpse. All of those things are interesting on their own, but they are put off to the edge, put out of focus, so that they don’t overwhelm the bench’s role. So we don’t forget who the story is about.
Here’s that painting I did this weekend:
The people are the focus. But there’s all kinds of noise in this picture. Hanging flowers, a crock by a fireplace, two people sitting in the background, stairs, Rustic Architecture™. Even the light across the table is noise, an artful forgery.
This isn’t really as immersive:
I need the noise to make it feel real. I don’t want someone’s first gut impression to be wow, that looks like it must have been hard. I want their first impression to be an emotion. Noise.
That’s how I make characters. I start with a very tiny seed of a real person, carefully and artlessly forged, and then I begin to complicate it until I’ve made someone as noisy as a real person. But unlike a real person, I select every element to manipulate how the reader feels about the character. A slash of light across the bench to immediately ground it in our real world and show that it follows our physical rules. A violin beneath to provoke interest. A complicated and cohesive backstory that is barely visible at first glance.
Salient noise. Forgery plus. Rustic Architecture™.
Does this make sense? In my head it does. But things are sort of cluttered up there. Heck of a lot of benches.
urs,
Stiefvater
