One of the most thrilling experiences as a storyteller is when your characters start to write themselves. Maybe it’s already happened to you, maybe it hasn’t, but write long enough and hard enough and it almost certainly will.
It’s a wonderful feeling, to be able to sit down and just have another person come flying out of your fingers. Obviously, there are questions to be asked about where you as the writer stop and this new person begins, but either way the joy is real. “Of course ___ would do that, she’s always doing that!” “Ha! That’s exactly what ____ would say in this situation!” Scroll through the writing side of tumblr and you see dozens of these posts. Hundreds. Thousands.
So yeah, characters like that are great to write. But how are they to read? As writers we assume that they’ll come across being so charming, so clever, so profoundly themselves that everyone else has no choice but to be swept of their feet, even by our villains.
Sure would be nice, wouldn’t it?
Sadly, while this sort of writing certainly doesn’t make characters any worse, it doesn’t really make them as better as we often think it does. Getting a really good sense of who a character is makes them easier to write, and on the other side giving readers a really good sense of who a character is makes them more realistic, more relatable-- especially in character-driven pieces. It’s excellent at making characters seem human. But characters aren’t supposed to be human. As the really very amazingly fantastically good writer (most of the time) Aaron Sorkin puts it:
“Characters and people aren’t the same thing. They only look alike”
Pithy, but important. In that same interview (https://www.aerogrammestudio.com/2016/07/28/aaron-sorkin-on-writing/), he cuts right to the heart of the matter:
“David Mamet has written some excellent essays on this subject. You can get lost in the weeds if you sit down and try to create an entire biography for your character. If this is what they were like when they were six years old, and this is what they did when they were seven years old, and they scraped their knee when they were eight years old. Your character, assuming your character is 50 years old, was never six years old, or seven years old or eight years old. Your character was born the moment the curtain goes up, the moment the movie begins, the moment the television show begins, and your character dies as soon as it’s over. Your character only becomes seven years old when they say, ‘Well when I was seven years old, I fell in a well, and ever since then I’ve had terrible claustrophobia. Okay?’”
The reader only knows what you show and tell them. Pretty basic stuff, and any experienced writer can construct scenes and plots and characters with that in mind. But what Sorkin is really getting at is the idea that none of the enthusiasm or insight an author has for their characters comes through to the reader unless that enthusiasm or insight is demonstrated in the same way as any other in-universe fact: showing and/or telling. In other words, if you don’t tell your readers that the characters they’re reading wrote themselves, the readers will have no clue. Obviously, cutting into your text with “by the way I’m really good at writing this character” every few lines gets old so fast it was probably never young. That’s where what I call “force-of-nature” characterization comes in.
Most, if not all of the time, exposition is done through a character-lens. In first person, that lens clearly belongs to the protagonist, while in third person it can hop around a little, but really good exposition nearly always revolves around what characters do and don’t know. So in order to make it clear to the reader how well you understand your characters, you have to make it clear how well the characters understand each other.
“Pryce Gilligan nodded wryly at the two dead bodies in the bathroom. Ellie sighed, impatient”
When I wrote this, I knew right away that this was what Pryce Gilligan would do-- how could he not? So he did. And the way it’s written isn’t altogether bad. It makes it clear to the reader what Pryce Gilligan did, but it doesn’t make it clear how well I as the writer knew that that was what Pryce Gilligan was going to do.
“Pryce Gilligan nodded wryly at the two dead bodies in the bathroom. I didn’t see Pryce Gilligan nod wryly at the two dead bodies in the bathroom, but I knew Pryce Gilligan-- and the Pryce Gilligan I knew was physically incapable of not doing that. Ellie’s impatient sigh confirmed it”
Quite possibly overkill, but it gets the job done. The protagonist is convinced that he knows Pryce, and then he’s proven right. The protagonist can predict other characters like the weather if he or she knows them well enough. Hence “force-of-nature”. The easiest way to show that a character is so solid that their behavior can be intuited is to have lots of other characters intuiting it. “Martha snapped her fingers a lot” is pretty efficient for letting readers know that Martha snaps her fingers a lot. “Johnny heard snapping fingers and knew right away that it was Martha, because Martha accounted for such a large proportion of the planet’s finger-snapping that expected anyone else to come strolling around the corner would have been statistically absurd” shows the reader that Martha snaps her fingers a lot and that everyone who knows her knows that she snaps her fingers a lot which really demonstrates much more viscerally how much she snaps her fingers.
It is in this way that that first Sorkin quote comes back. “Characters and people aren’t the same thing”. Martha is not a person who snaps her fingers. Martha is finger-snapping itself. Johnny reacts to Martha with the resignation as cloudy skies and high humidity. He grabs an umbrella.
To conclude, think about Harry Potter. If you’re already thinking about Harry Potter, keep thinking about Harry Potter, but focus your thoughts on characters like Dumbledore or Hagrid-- characters who really shape the tone and mood of the books. Rowling does a fantastic job of introducing these characters to Harry, who doesn’t know them at first, by having them do lots of fun and interesting things. But Dumbledore and Hagrid don’t start becoming really deeply special until a little later, when Harry knows them well enough to expect them to be a certain way.
