Reader Meets Character

In order for a reader to like a character that reader has to feel like they know the kind of person the character is.

This is easiest to achieve using archetypes, stereotypes and clichés. The cynical but brilliant detective, the unfairly betrayed wife, the shy but sweet nerd... You feel like you know these characters because you really have known them, in one guise or another, all your life.

And while the received wisdom is too avoid the overly familiar, I don’t think it can be denied that lots of successful books use character-types we’ve all seen many, many, many times before (maybe with an added twist, but not always); and these variations on Cinderella or Philip Marlowe or whatever can be very successful.

But often the reason writers fall back on the tried and tested is because they don’t really know how to get the reader to know the character quickly without resorting to the shorthand of referencing traits already out there.

If Mary is your best friend and I give you a hypothetical situation such as:

Mary’s going out with a guy for six months when he tells her it’s over because she’s put on a bit of weight and he doesn’t want to date a fat chick.

And then I ask you to tell me what you think Mary would respond, maybe even give you a few options:

a) punch him in the face.

b) burst into tears.

c) thank him for being honest and go to the gym.

I think, if you know Mary well, you’d have a pretty good idea of what Mary would do.

However, if you didn’t know Mary and I gave you some background information on her, and then asked you the same question, what sort of info would you need to be able make an educated guess?

What about her parents’ jobs, financial status, where her grandparents originated from?

These all might give you a sense of the type of person Mary might be, but lots of people are born on the same day in the same town, and they’re all pretty different, so knowing those sorts of details won’t really tell you anything specific in terms of personality.

In fact, only by relying on clichés can I really suggest anything with personal info of this sort. If I tell you she’s a single child of a lawyer and a doctor both of whom work long hours, then you might get the idea she’s lonely and starved of attention. But only because that’s how that particular family setup is portrayed. I’m sure there are a lot of kids with busy parents who are fine, or who wish their parents wouldn’t bother them so much.

Let me tell you a story about Mary. Back in nursery, we were only four, a boy came up to me and called me a bad word. There were no adults around (in those days kids weren’t mollycoddled like they are today, plus I think our nursery teacher had a terrible hangover). I burst into tears. Mary grabbed the boy by the back of the collar and dragged him into the bathroom, where she sat on his chest and forced him to eat a whole bar of soap, which she’d heard was what you did to someone who was rude.

Now, if I ask you the hypothetical question about Mary, would you have a better idea of which option to pick?

And it's not even that there's some similarity in backstory and hypothetical. If Mary was in the army and her unit was hit, if she was stalked by a serial killer or if her came face to face with an alien, that childhood story would still give you  a sense of how she'd react.

The point is details may provide details, but only story tells you the story. Backstory, exposition, general background information all makes more sense to the reader when it is portrayed as an event that happened rather than a list of data.

And while filling outa character sheet is a good place to start the getting to know you process, it isn’t until you know the gossip-worthy moments of a person’s life that you get a feel for them as a person. 

Then again, a one-dimensional villain isn't always a bad thing...

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