So, I'm impressed with quite a lot about your writing, but one of the things I'm impressed with the most is how you do characters. The characters are just really /Real/ and alive and vivid. My characters are round and have flaws and motivations and everything that smart people say good characters need to have, but. They're still just not as /Real/ as yours. So if you have time, could you give some tips for developing characters? Thanks!
Let’s say someone asked you to draw a person.
If you’d never drawn a person before or thought you didn’t have much time, you might do one of these guys:
Example A: stick dude. A stick dude is recognizable as a person because it follows the baseline, easiest rules of personhood. It’s got a head, a torso, a familiar arrangement of limbs. You don’t need more to get the concept of “person” across.
Now, if you had a bit of experience drawing people or thought you had more time, you might do something more like
Example B: Cartoon Dude. Cartoon Dude is even easier to recognize as a human. He follows the rules of personhood even more: he’s got facial features, ears, hair, clothing, shoes. You can tell one cartoon dude from another cartoon dude. You can populate an entire series with cartoon dudes and the storytelling would work, because they would effectively follow the baseline rules of human anatomy as well as being unique enough to tell apart.
Now let’s say you had a bit more time or you had some more experience drawing people and someone asked you to draw a human realistically. Depending on how much you’d done it, you might get
Example C: 3-D dude without reference. A 3-D dude drawn without reference is even more recognizable as human. He can hold all sorts of nuance in his expression because he follows the baseline rules of personhood even better than the previous two. More nuance means more empathy from the viewer, and more empathy usually means more emotional resonance.
And finally, let’s say someone asks you to draw a human but gives you an actual person to look at. In the same amount of time given, you might end up with
Example D: Portrait with reference. This guy (one of my brothers, in fact) follows the rules of personhood, their effectiveness limited only by my ability to capture them in the time given or by my level of experience. He’s recognizable as both a person and an individual because of the specificity of his facial features, and moreover, he is unlikely to look like any other person I would draw using this method because of my close adherence to his, you know, actual face.
If you think about this in terms of characters, you could build a novel with any one of these sorts of character.
Example A: A novel built with stick man characters would be incredibly stylized. Fairy tales are often stick figure characters. Instead of being fully-fleshed individuals, they’re types. This is the stick figure woodsman (we can tell it’s him, he’s drawn with an ax). This is the princess (we can tell it’s her, she’s got a crown and some long hair added to the stick figure). This is the knight (we can tell it’s him, he’s got a sword and a stick horse). People don’t actually look like stick figures, but as long as the characters are all stick figures, the narrative still works at some level, because it tells you the rules and follows them, even if they aren’t the rules of reality. The moment you draw one character as something more than a stick figure, though, the viewer suddenly realizes how the others are merely made of straight lines.
Example B: When I first began to write, I used to write novels with accidental cartoon characters. I knew I couldn’t populate a novel with stick figures, so I tried to flesh them out. What makes a human a human? I asked myself desperately. Specifics! I made character worksheets and dutifully filled them out with attributes. Height, hair color, eye color, hobbies, place of residence, parental occupation, etc. etc. I ended up with characters who followed the rules of being human, and they could carry a story, but they still didn’t feel real.
I’m skipping Example C for now, because it’s a byproduct, for me, of failing to remember the lessons of Example D.
Example D: Example D is how I build characters now. I begin by studying real people instead of by creating lists of traits. I end up with shadows I forgot to draw in my cartoon version, hair that looks like actual hair instead of what I sort of remember what hair looks like, and feet that have all the toes drawn in because with a reference, I can remember how to accurately draw a pinkie toe. Real people are complicated and surprising. If I were building a character with a fear of water without looking at a real person, I might give them the phobia because they’d nearly drowned once: the easiest and most logical answer. It wouldn’t necessarily be wrong — it would follow rules that a reader would understand. But if I looked at a real person with a fear of water, I might discover that their fear developed because of an obsession with quantifying the abstract, and trying to understand the concept of an infinite body of water made them anxious. A much more complicated answer, but more specific and more real because of it. If I populate a book with characters built like this, I’m going to end up with a nuanced story that should have more emotional resonance. Moreover, the more I study real humans and build characters from them, the less I have to lean on real humans to make secondary characters. As I learn the more subtle rules of how people’s personalities are made, I can start to build new humans who don’t exist — who nonetheless appear as if they could.
Example C: I’m returning to example C because it’s a cautionary tale for me. Even though I feel that I’m worlds better than that old version of me writing cartoony people who could only exist in a two-dimensional place, if I get lazy with my character development, or if I try to create a sort of person I’ve never met in real life from scratch, I can still end up with one of these weird cartoon-realistic hybrids. A character who nearly looks real but lacks the subtle, observed nuances that I can only get from keeping an eye on real life. These characters follow the rules, and they have back stories and hobbies and nuance, but they’re still lacking the surprising, non-linear subtleties of a real person, or they’re lacking the specificity that comes from studying a real-life elbow and carefully transcribing the shape of it.
There are particular sorts of things I look for in real people when I’m stealing bits and bobs, but that is a topic for another blog post. For now, I’m going to go figure out why I still can’t draw feet.
