Lifting Characters Off the Page

Sometimes a character is born fully-formed. You know them as well as a member of your family and you don’t need to figure out what they think because they’re more than happy to tell you.

Other times, the character just sits on the page, lifeless and uncooperative.  You can write up a biography, have a folder full of background details and still they’re no more alive than a robot.

Creating a character that’s more than just a bag of bones is key to making a story live and breathe. But characters don’t always appear with an interesting personality and unique voice all ready to get the adventure underway. You can give them all the quirky habits and dark secrets you want, but when it comes to carrying the story from your imagination to the reader’s, something feels a little flat.

So, how can you get your characters to talk to you, and how do you make sure that what they have to say is worth reading about?

The most straightforward way to check on your character’s ability to hold the reader’s attention is to put them into a scene.

This doesn’t have to be a scene that’s going to be in your story, it just has to be a high pressure situation. It can be as realistic or fanciful as you like. The purpose of doing this is to see how the character handles things in an environment you control. You can turn up the heat, throw a spanner into the works and generally shift the walls of the maze around as you please.

At the start of a story there may not be much going on. The character might have to engage the reader without the benefit of exciting events to help. Or, things could start of so hectic the character becomes overwhelmed and hard to connect with while craziness happens. If you don’t have a strong sense of who your character is and what they’re about, it may take a while to figure out.

But if you take a little time to imagine them in a tricky scenario (you don’t have to write it down, you can just daydream it), then you can force them into revealing themselves, and you’ll find once they start they won’t be able to stop.

So let’s say I have a character I want to get to know better so I plop him down in the middle of a bank just as armed robbers run in and tell everybody to get on the floor. Or I have him abducted by aliens. Or maybe he finds himself in the middle of Oz facing the Wicked Witch of the West.

The beauty of this approach is that you can use any obvious, familiar, clichéd set up you can think of. Something you’ve recently seen in a movie or read in a book, something that happened to you in real life, it doesn’t matter.

And once you do have a scenario that you like, that tests the character in ways that help you, you can reuse it for other characters.

There’s three things to remember though. First, your character has to be central to what happens, they can’t just stay on the periphery observing things, it defeats the point.

Second, no easy ways out. If they just do what they’re told or run away, you’ll learn nothing. Remember you can use the other characters in this hypothetical scene, and even the setting itself, to block off the obvious exits.

And third, be patient. There’s a good chance the first couple of things that will come to mind won’t be that good. There will be things that occur to you that will be flat and uninteresting, or plain “borrowed” from things you have seen. Just discard them and try something else.

In the story proper you might be inclined to persevere with a scenario, dance around it to see if you can work something out, but here you can simply abandon a path as soon as you feel like it isn’t doing anything for you. At this point the only person you’re trying to appeal to is yourself.

You don’t need to work out an ending or a solution to a problem, the only aim is to see how the character interacts with other characters, with their surroundings, with a difficult problem, and if it leads anywhere.

So how do you know when the process is working? I mean, you can have them do this and that, but is it revealing anything useful?

An interesting character doesn’t just deal with problems, their actions result in a host of possibilities. That’s when you know a character clicks, not just in what they do but all the options that suddenly open up and you find yourself being drawn along by the momentum.

When choice leads to another and then another without you having to pause to make stuff up, that's when the character is starting to lead you.

In order to allow this to happen you need to give the character a chance to act (rather than think). Acting and doing is at the core of getting to know a character. What they say and think is important, but it’s hard to unlock them from that end.

If you take a character and give them a subject to pontificate on (politics, religion, hatred for the French) it’s not difficult to fill a couple of pages of observations and opinions, but if you put that character in an actual predicament (meeting a hated political figure and having to be nice; a believer whose good behaviour is punished but his bad behaviour is rewarded; meeting a polite Parisian—in fiction anything is possible) it becomes much easier to develop a three dimensional character. 

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