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Hi, Alethia! How do you manage to keep your characters so - for a lack of a better word - in-character? Like, how do you manage to keep their dialogues/banters to feel authentically like the characters in the show?

I think about this a lot, so it's heartening to hear that they feel in-character to you! The short answer is I always try to ground everything in canon as much as possible. I'm trying to capture the guys on screen, so I spend a lot of time analyzing what's on that screen. That means not only watching the show multiple times, but I'll also read the transcripts to get a sense of each character's particular linguistic quirks. What kinds of words and phrases do they commonly use? Outside of medical terms, are they dropping a lot of three-syllable words or do they keep it simple? Are their sentences brief or long and meandering? What kind of slang and humor do they use? In their speech, do they confront or do they evade? Once I figure out a character's usual behavior, in my stories I'll do the same. Jack is a to-the-point kind of guy who peppers in some quirky (dorky) turns of phrase, so that's how I write him. Robby and Jack's banter has a rhythm to it; if you read it all together, you'll see the pattern and then it's just about writing with that same pattern. Etc.

But characterization is more than just dialogue; it's also how characters move through the world. For that, one helpful thing to do is watch the scenes without sound. How do they take up space in a room? This makes their physicality more obvious, so we can see Robby cradling his head or recoiling from Al-Hashimi or accepting Jack's touch, all of which tells us about him.

I adore textual analysis, which gets long, so I'm gonna go into some specific examples behind the cut...

First, as with all things, let us define our terms. This is a good rundown of canon/headcanon/interpretation/fanon. Since I'm trying to stay in character to the guys we see on screen, we're dealing with canon (what happens on screen, also called the text) and interpretation (how you read canon). A close analysis of canon can help you understand the characters more deeply, which helps in writing them. When analyzing a text, I'm always asking some questions - what's the character doing? why? where does that come from? what's it related to? what does it say about them? what do they want others to think? what follows from it? is there a social context to it? The answers to those questions will tell you about who they are and you can explore related things from there.

I'll give a couple examples. First, a small canonical thing that I find charming:

Robby generally opens the door for women. My favorite example of this is when he does it for Kiara, who's in the middle of a thought, and she doesn't even pause. That means that she's used to Robby opening doors for her, this is a Thing He Does. So of course I'm instantly asking where that comes from. A man opening doors for women is pretty traditional learned behavior, so where'd he learn that? My first thought was, "Oh, his bubbe raised him well."

That's an easy assumption, but let's unpack the social context here. As a Gen Xer, when Robby was growing up there was still some emphasis on men specifically being courteous to women. Opening doors, pulling out chairs, even standing when a woman joins or leaves a table, among many other things. This has fallen out of favor in younger generations (outside, perhaps, more conservative areas), but was seen as a sign of courtesy and respect back in the day. Since developmentally, children's brains take a dump at around age 7 - which is why people can't really remember their early childhoods, outside certain strong memories - this would likely be behavior Robby learned after his mother abandoned him. It's reasonable to assume that Robby's grandparents emphasized courtesy to women as they raised him.

But you could also use this fact from canon (Robby opens doors for women) to tell a different story. Off the top of my head...let's say Robby got himself a full ride to UPenn, a storied Ivy League school, and suddenly this poor kid finds himself among rich kids who operate on all these codes of behavior he doesn't understand. I'd buy a story where Robby seeks out training on social graces, to learn how to successfully navigate a world that is not his own, and that's where this kind of traditional chivalry comes from. Now, that's not canon. It's upstream of what we see in the show, surely never to be directly stated, but it's an interpretation that's founded in canon because it's based on behavior we see. And behavior comes from somewhere. This is how analyzing the text (asking why he's doing that) can lead to various interpretations that spawn stories. Importantly, the interpretations themselves aren't canon (like that Robby was a scholarship kid at an Ivy), only the behavior we see on screen is (opening doors for women).

You can also do this to analyze and understand a character more generally. Different, but related example: outside of emergencies, Robby will always politely excuse himself from a room. This is good manners, so again I'm thinking Robby's bubbe raised him well. A cynical interpretation might be that he just does it for patient satisfaction scores, but that's not true because he also does it with his colleagues. My favorite example is when he says, "If you'll excuse me," to Baby Jane Doe herself, even though she can't understand, and then to Al-Hashimi in 2.01. Good manners!

Since he does this consistently, it tells me this is ingrained, manners are important to him. Where else do we see him having good manners? We see him greet everyone by name, including the cleaning staff. (This is pretty extraordinary.) He's the Chief of the ED, but he still uses "please" and "thank you" liberally. Even after Dana loses it on him in front of everyone in 2.12, he pulls her aside to soberly take in her grievances. He puts an emphasis on professionalism and good manners.

Some characters like that avoid conflict so that everyone gets along. Is that Robby? Oh, fuck no. While Robby avoids talking about his own feelings (except with Jack and eventually Duke), he has no problem getting into conflict with people, including politely highlighting others' bad behavior.

An example of this is when Al-Hashimi arrives and pulls a bunch of staff aside for a mock code. This is disrespectful to both Robby and Shen, which Robby states outright ("That takes giant balls of disrespect"). Robby goes and politely introduces himself to her anyway, welcoming her to the Pitt. But he also makes clear that he's annoyed. When a trauma comes in, he says, "Ooh, who wants to treat a real patient?" while shooting her a look. Al-Hashimi correctly reads this, but tries to sidestep it with a non-apology ("I hope you don't mind me jumping right into things"). The get-along move would be to wave it off, but the thing is, Robby does mind. So he conveys that to her ("Well...it might've been nice if we'd had a little time to go over how we do things"). Which not only says, 'that's not how we do things,' but also says, 'maybe ask first.' (Notably Al-Hashimi never asks a single question about how they do things, outside of when to leave.) They're both being passive-aggressive, but it's all polite, even as they are seriously butting heads.

This is an example of how conflict comes in many tones. You don't have to be shouting at someone to be in conflict with them. See also Robby's, "You have no respect for your superiors," scene with Collins. Robby was very quiet about it, making sure no one else heard, but that was a fight about professional behavior in the workplace. (Also a typical scene from The Pitt nuance show, where everybody is right and everybody is wrong.)

While Robby is generally polite, he will get into it if he has a problem. The most extraordinary example of this is when Robby calls out the CEO himself, in front of the entire staff ("You didn't want to talk to me first? You didn't want to consult my department?"). For context, the American CEO class is made up of a lot of fragile rich manbabies. Calling one out publicly is a great way to get yourself fired. The fact that Norris calls Robby a rockstar right before outright disrespecting him by having gone to Al-Hashimi instead shows how fraught that relationship is. And still, Robby pushes back. He's not unreasonable about it, but it's not the politically smart move. Robby clearly doesn't care about the politics of it, which we see over and over again with how he pushes back at his superiors. Because of all this, in fic I'd write Robby as fully willing to get into conflict at work, especially with his bosses. When he avoids, it's about his own feelings, but otherwise conflict doesn't bother him.

So if this character generally has good manners, what about when he behaves badly? That is when you know something's up. If a character is breaking their own behavioral pattern, that's a signal to the audience. The big example of this is when he mocks Mohan's panic attack; it's such a break from his normal behavior that we know he's deeply struggling. As S2 goes on, this happens more and more, until he's deliberately humiliating the medics in front of the entire ED in 2.14. The show uses his change of manners to subtly convey his deteriorating mental state, paired with direct scenes about it (this ain't a subtle show), but it's an effective reinforcing tool. And it's one fic writers can use, too!

From what we see on screen, Robby is the type of man who will hew to politeness except in extreme circumstances, so I'd never write a story where Robby's generally a jerk to his colleagues/patients outside of some sort of crisis because that would be ooc. If I put him in a non-emergent scene where he's talking to folks, I know that he should excuse himself before leaving because that's what he always does. If I want to subtly convey that something is wrong, I could have him rush out without excusing himself; that breaks his pattern and is a way to signal a problem to the reader without stating it outright. Analyzing characters' usual behavioral patterns lets us narratively use those patterns to convey meaning of all kinds!

What about when other people violate this behavioral code with Robby? Canon gives us an example. In 2.14, with the woman having a heart attack, Robby comes in to talk to Al-Hashimi, who says she's got the case covered, at which point Robby sees that the leads on the patient are comically misplaced. Multiple HCWs have explained that their placement is egregious, so the fact that Al-Hashimi didn't know that is bizarre. After they place the leads correctly, they call a code STEMI, Shen and Crus roll in, and Al-Hashimi bounces without saying a word to anyone. Notably, she doesn't excuse herself, as we've seen her do elsewhere.

Robby does a literal 360, asks where she is, goes to the door to look out onto the floor, and though it's half in profile, his expression and body language say it all: he is deeply fuckin' unimpressed. He came into that scene intending to ask about the absence seizure he witnessed, but this case is an additional ding on her. Not only did she not see that the leads were absurdly misplaced, thus missing a heart attack that could have killed that patient, she didn't even have the good manners to excuse herself. It's hardly the most important thing there, but he likely clocked it. He's already worried about her ability to run the department and this adds fuel to the fire, both in her clinical ability and in her behavior.

I'd love to know what Robby wanted to talk to her about, whether he was going to raise a concern about her missing the lead placement problem or if he was going to question her about the seizure. It's probably the latter, because Robby weirdly gave a pass to everyone involved when even the two nurses should have known better. I suspect this is just the show eliding the details because it wanted to get to Robby yelling at the medics, but in reality, our people cut that woman's clothes off; they all should have caught that mistake long before Robby did. This is an example of where analyzing a story highlights the holes in it, which is true all over the show. But that type of iffy storytelling can offer the opportunity to write fic in the cracks.

If all of this seems deeply granular...yep, it is. You can do this for every character, for every moment. It's always asking, why is this character doing what they're doing? What does their behavior say about them? Where does it come from? If a character is well-written, their behavior will be consistent across episodes, so you'll be able to predict* how they'll generally react to things.

Obviously, this changes over time, as we get new material that illuminates new facets of characters. My earliest stories have certain behavioral dynamics of Jack and Robby flipped because we just didn't know much about them at all. But the more we get, the more we know. Hopefully the show keeps the characters consistent, but a lot of shows don't as the seasons go on, which then presents a tricky interpretation problem.

I've rambled on long enough, but hopefully this gives a sense of the thought process. Basically, to keep characters authentic to what we see on screen, it helps to deeply analyze all their important moments in the show. It's a lot, but can also be very rewarding!

*I will say, a consequence of really analyzing and understanding the characters is that nothing will surprise you. The only Robby character moments that surprised me in S2 were his crack about Al-Hashimi's name, his reaction to Caleb's "empathetic" line, and the Mohan anecdote about the wife/kids/pond. I'd even been working under the belief that he lost his parents at 8. So it does take a bit of the surprise out of everything. But that's also a sign of a consistent show!

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