Necromancy for Beginners
“I care more about the people in books than the people I see every day.” Jo Walton, Among Others
I apologise to those who are disappointed that this is about characterisation. We might move on to hexing and magick in a later post. I’m not sure whether we’ve talked about headology before - Granny Weatherwax’s superpower - also shared by her creator, the wonderful Terry Pratchett. But headology is our topic for today. Understanding how people work is important for writers as well as witches.
All fiction is driven by character. Whether literary or genre, this is what we read for - because we are endlessly curious about what makes people tick - whether it’s ourselves, or the collection of other idiots we share a planet with.
Forgive me, I’ve just been on twitter. That said, we can all be stupid sometimes.
Story is driven by the major characters - heroes or antiheroes, protagonists and antagonists - who are in some way changed by the various things which happen to them.
We identify with these characters, some more than others!, and when a fiction works, we experience what they experience, and we learn what they learn. We are changed by the novels we read.
If we want people to have this kind of experience reading our novels, we really need to create characters who come alive.
(cartoon by Tom Gauld. Highly recommended for procrastination purposes)
Characters who come alive
There are very few “rules” of writing which are unassailable, but I have always felt this one from Mark Twain is as close as it’s possible to get.
“The personages in a tale shall be alive, except in the case of corpses, and that always the reader shall be able to tell the corpses from the others.”
Mark Twain
This was a part of Twain’s “war” on the writer James Fenimore Cooper, best known for Last of the Mohicans. I’ve never read any of his work, so I can’t say if it’s deserved. It seems more likely to be a difference in literary taste. It’s still an amusing read, for those of us who are addicted to the never-ending flow of “Rules for Writing”.
Creating characters who come alive
even fleetingly on the page, requires effort. To create those who live on in our memories, more so.
"When writing a novel a writer should create living people; people not characters. A character is a caricature."
Ernest Hemingway
Wherever you find the germ of a story you want to tell, the novel cannot come to life for the reader, until the main character comes to life for the writer.
There are various methods suggested for creating characters that can be found online and in different books about writing. There are “character worksheets” where you can build up a profile for your character, creating every detail from height, eye colour, details about their families, likes and dislikes, their sense of style… these lists go on and on.
This one is very comprehensive - with 150 questions!
While I agree with the principle that we need to know more about our characters than ever appears on the pages of our novels, for me this is not the most helpful kind of thoroughness. It’s not individual enough.
Maybe for some people it’s a good place to start looking for inspiration, but none of us can be summed up by a list of traits and mannerisms. These are not the important aspects of us.
For our characters to really come to life, there has to be something deeply emotional at the heart of the story. Something which matters to the character. Something that matters to the writer. That’s what draws the reader in to empathise with and care about what happens to the character.
For me, the first glimmerings of a novel coming into being are when I have a character and a theme or story that just go together. They tend to develop in tandem, and feed into each other.
In my second novel I knew my theme was about wilful blindness in a dysfunctional family, and gradually my main character, Alice, became the kind of person who would be so severely affected that she would have to face it head on.
Her personality, her childhood, her background and her ambitions - all these came together to drive the story forward.
You might be inspired to create a character based on a real person - maybe it’s someone you know, maybe it’s an actor or a singer you have a thing for, or maybe it’s a part of yourself that never developed, an alternative life you might have lived. It’s best not to stick too closely to the reality - not just because you might offend people! but because it’s not the best way to create a compelling character - unless you are determined to write a roman a clef., or are the latest rival to Donna Tartt, or like Hilary Mantel, you are writing about a historical character. Your knowledge of another person is only ever partial, for a start. So it’s better to use your imagination and deliberately transform, for example, their appearance, background, education. It’s more satisfying.
Protagonist and antagonist, or hero and villain
Another of the “rules” of writing suggests that it’s important that the main character should be sympathetic so that the reader can identify with them.
I guess it depends what is meant by sympathetic.
When I was on a writing course a few years back, my tutor returned a story which she had marked down because the narrator was unsympathetic.
Reader, that narrator was based on me. It was one of my few directly autobiographical stories.
One of my favourite characters in fiction is Nicholas Urfe, from John Fowles’ novel The Magus - who is far more antihero than hero. Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl is a divisive novel, in part because both the major characters are unlikeable enough that some readers found the novel unreadable.
Patricia Highsmith wrote the psychopathic Tom Ripley in such a way that it’s all too easy to empathise with him.
Then there’s Pollyanna, who is so good at making lemonade out of lemons and without sugar, that I have always wanted to throttle her.
Sympathetic and likeable is not really the point, I suggest. Compelling, interesting, human… all of these are better kinds of characters. Likeable is a bit insipid without an interesting flaw or two to spice things up. Iris Murdoch said writing about good people was boring, Tolstoy said the same of happy families.
We long to read about conflict and growth.
Antagonists
As I’m mostly writing crime fiction, I tend to think of my antagonists as being villains. My narrators tend to be looking for some form of justice. Okay, it’s often revenge. And my villains are the people who have hurt them or the people they love.
Even villains can’t be two dimensional though. They need to be fully rounded characters, who are heroes in the their own stories. Even the most evil of characters has some good qualities, and some depth. My very favourite fictional villain is charming and is seen as a good person by most of the characters in the novels. An observant reader, however, may notice that what he says may be undermined by what he does.
Beyond the crime genre though, antagonists may be merely human. They’re the kind of people who get under our antagonist’s skin. Maybe it’s even someone who loves them. A mother who wants to protect her child from getting hurt and discourages them from taking risks, is one example that springs to mind. A business partner who wants the company to develop in a different direction. He might even be right - or he may be an out-and-out villain, bent on fraud.
In a police procedural, the boss might be an antagonist who makes the job harder. I’ve just re-read Sophie Hannah’s A Room Swept White, and was reminded that Detective Inspector Giles Proust, known as The Snowman, is one of my favourite examples of the obstructive boss.
Like the main character, the antagonist also wants something, and from their point of view, it seems entirely reasonable. From the protagonist’s point of view, what the antagonist wants is an obstacle or a source of conflict.
This tension is one of the things that keeps the story moving. And as writers or readers, understanding what drives the characters and the conflict is a huge part of what makes for vivid and memorable characters.
The importance of minor characters
“We may divide characters into flat and round”
EM Forster
Minor characters are allowed to be flat, two dimensional. More than that, it’s actually better if they are - otherwise the reader may be disappointed that the quirky postman doesn’t show up again, once they’ve invested a little bit too much in him.
Flat characters are usually only there for the plot - they have a simple function in the story.
Round characters, the ones which are at the heart of our fictions, need richness and depth. To develop these characters we must use our craft - from lively description of their appearance to seeing them put through the emotional wringer in a variety of situations.
Don’t have too many characters!
Into The Water, Paula Hawkins’ followup to The Girl on the Train, falls into this trap, I think. I enjoyed reading it, but many have criticised it for being confusing. It’s told in a mixture of third and first person, and there are (I had to look it up!( eleven different narrators, all with rather similar voices. Although it is potentially a brilliant thriller , this really does spoil it. I’m sure there must have been a better way to tell the underlying story.
I guess in fantasy series, like Game of Thrones, or Hilary Mantel’s historical series about Thomas Cromwell, starting with Wolf Hall - it can work. But even in the hands of brilliant writers like Mantel, it is harder work for the reader. The presence of character lists and family trees at the beginning makes it obvious than many of us will be flipping back and forth trying to work out who’s who.
So it’s not an invariable rule, but before setting off in that direction we might consider how hard a writer has to work to earn that faith from the reader.
What doesn’t work, for me, is not having a main character. We readers need someone at the heart of the story who we are rooting for.
In Game of Thrones, George RR Martin plays with us, allowing us to get attached to Ned Stark, and then pulls the rug from under us by killing him off very early. (That’s not a spoiler, is it? Played by Sean Bean in the TV series, after all). It’s a different kind of story, rather like the historical examples, or the family sagas, which can all have large casts of characters. And although Ned Stark dies, House Stark is right at the centre of the story. Or do I mean True North?
Let the reader do some of the work!
You don’t have to tell the reader everything about your characters - certainly not straight away, and actually not ever.
When we meet people in real life, we get to know them gradually, and we make lots of guesses about what they’re like based on all sorts of different clues - how they speak, what they wear, how comfortable they are in their own skin.
To an extent this relies on stereotyping - and that’s fine, we don’t have time to create a full psychological profile of everyone. And the things we notice, the things we learn from - they are often the stuff where they are individual.
My beloved, a system designer and programmer, calls this “exception processing” To oversimplify, we don’t need to tell the reader that each character has ten fingers-and-thumbs, but it’s worth mentioning Anne Boleyn’s extra finger. Just for fun and procrastination, I spent a little time delving into the Google rabbit-hole on this issue, to discover there’s a range of opinions about this. Some proclaim Henry would not have married a woman with such an obvious defect, some argue it’s an invention, post hoc, to prove she was witch, others suggest that she may have had the hint of an extra nail on her little finger. All of this is intriguing, but for our purposes it demonstrates that the unusual, out of the ordinary is likely to make our characters more interesting and memorable.
Some writers put a lot of effort into physical description of the characters. I tend to skimp on that - partly because as a reader, I prefer to create my own vision and I expect other readers do the same. I reckon this is one reason why we can be disappointed by film and TV adaptations - the casting director hasn’t seen into our minds.
I do keep track of what I’ve written though, because I don’t want to break the spell for those who do notice. And there are times when it matters to the characters, and so that becomes more important to the reader. One of my characters had a glamourous mother who disapproved of her, and so she was always conscious of the scruffy jeans and tee shirts she chose to wear.
I am more interested in exploring the deeper aspects of character - their emotions, their flaws, their desires and motivations.
Finding the voice also matters - especially as I prefer to write in first person.
The work of characterisation runs through every aspect of the novel.
It’s there when the character is alone - what they do, what they think, how they feel. It’s there in how they interact with the other characters. Show us if the girl who is prim and proper at home, swears when she’s with her friends.
Show us a man who is a tyrant in the workplace and is meek in the domestic sphere, or vice versa.
Show us how they behave when things change, or when they go wrong.
Put them under pressure, and see how they cope.
What makes a compelling character?
Some of our favourite characters are larger than life. Sherlock - in several variations. Similarly James Bond - different in the books and in his many incarnations in film - but still, there’s something of the core character that we recognise. Murderbot too - totally unique and yet still human, even though not-human.
Who can forget Mr Darcy? OK, so Jane Austen wasn’t responsible for that image of Colin Firth in wet shirt, but she was responsible for creating the splendid grounds of Pemberley, which made him so attractive to Elizabeth. Charles Dickens created many very memorable characters, from the sympathetic to the grotesque.
Even the most ordinary of protagonist must have something special about them - unless perhaps you are writing a story about an ordinary person who finds themselves in an extraordinary situation. Even in that scenario, the ordinary person is unusual in some way.
Perhaps instead of leaving a problem to the police or other authorities, they decide to investigate for themselves. That takes them out of the realm of the ordinary immediately - and as a writer you have to give them a good reason for being so different, and you might have to really push them into some horrible situations to force them to act.
Even in realistic novels, the characters and events are heightened - with the possible exception of the autobiographical novels of Karl Ove Knausgård. I’m not doubting he’s a very good writer, and I did try to read. I just found it all a bit dull.
Characters must be active
I’ve written above about the difficulty I had with Alice, who was incredibly passive to begin with. My early readers found her infuriating - all sorts of terrible things were happening to her and she just patiently endured, Griselda-like.
I realised that what was going on was that much of her struggle, her conflict, was internal. I worked on showing that, and then eventually I persuaded her to react, and one of the things she learned during the story was how to initiate action.
Yes, I know I’m talking about her as if she’s real.
Characters change
All characters are changed by their stories, and Alice was changed by hers. She stopped being passive and withdrawn and learned how to protect herself.
It’s vital to show that change and how it happens.
It may be that you start with a character like Alice who wouldn’t say boo to a goose. Who would? Geese are quite scary creatures. Her story becomes more interesting as I show her getting braver, taking more risks, and the more she acts. Instead of waiting for things to happen, she investigates. She confronts. She makes plans and she carries them out.
As one of the joys of a novel, compared with TV and film, is the interiority of it - it’s enjoyable as a reader to experience all this - though at a safe distance.
I’ve written characters who are good at pushing other people away, but who learn to let them closer, even to accept help. It’s a theme that shows up quite often in my novels. Maybe even in the one I’m writing now.
Back to Theory of Mind
which I talked about a couple of weeks ago in my post What is Fiction For
This is the cognitive science term for our ability to imagine what is going on in other people’s minds. In every day life, it’s a survival skill - it’s how we connect with people, make friends, fall in love etc,
But it’s also what allows us to imagine characters and use our words to make them (more or less, depending on our skill) come to life in the minds of readers.
There are all sorts of complicated concepts around this which we all navigate very well, even though we’ve not thought about them too deeply. We can read about David Copperfield and hold in our minds all the different versions of the character, from youth to old age, and we grasp that he knew different things at different ages, and was affected by what happened to him.
In reading crime fiction, an Agatha Christie for example, we know that Poirot and Miss Marple have different sets of perceptions and beliefs at each stage of the mystery…and that their understanding of the other characters’ actions and motivations change through the stories.
With a Walter Mitty character we grasp the different versions - one living in a fantasy, and one in the real world.
I keep saying that one of the advantages of the novel form is the interiority - how often we get a view of what is going on in the characters’ minds, especially our main character’s mind. Oddly, depending on point of view, we get partial access to the interiority of the other characters mediated though the main character’s perceptions and guesses. Even our own created characters have a theory of mind - and that lies the misapprehensions and eventual resolutions which form the basic plot of more romance novels.
When reading we gain access not only to Mitty-like fantasies, but to characters’ memories and plans, switching from the past, through the present, to the future. And we get to see how the characters views and perceptions change as they acquire more information. Character may thus learn that a character they trusted was deceiving them, or reconcile with someone they had misunderstood.
Real people
Most readers have wept when a favourite character dies, or even people we don’t know - maybe a musician or an actor whose work has had a profound impact on our lives.
Human empathy can be a bit unpredictable, I guess.
We can care about refugees from all over the world, although (to get a bit political) some people have less empathy than others, or distribute it differently.
We might feel less for the slow girl on the supermarket check out (unless, as in my case, that slow girl was me in the newsagents, once upon a time).
We might find it easier to feel more for those who are close to us, even our own goldfish or next door’s hamster, than we do for a starving child half way across the world.
This is natural - it’s the way our minds work. Some people are more real and important to us than others.
When we think about it more carefully - on a higher, ethical level - we know that real people in desperate situations matter more than fictional creations - even though our feelings for them may be similar.
However, as I argue in my previous post which attempted to answer what fiction is for, it’s one of the ways we learn to empathise with other people, with different experiences.
That’s why I am hugely in favour of thorough research (including finding sensitivity readers) to make sure that when we are creating characters outside our personal experience we really get as close to them as we can.
This may be a bit intimidating, but it’s also quite magical and inspiring I think.
And it’s especially relevant to the times we are in now, where politics is more divisive than ever (so we are told, although I suspect it has always been like this), the world seems harsher and scarier, and we may feel that writing fiction doesn’t matter, except as distraction.
So for us writers, I see this more as a call to arms. If we can create diverse characters with interesting backgrounds, who come to life on the page and then in people’s minds, in stories which have themes that matter to us - maybe we can do just a little to increase the levels of empathy and understanding in the world.
As Steven Pressfield says, we can write better than we are (thankfully), by creating the best stories we can, with nuance and avoiding lecturing our readers or boring them.
Perhaps it’s possible to change the world with good stories which engage with important issues, instead of imagining it’s possible to do it through Twitter pile-ons…
Even changing just one person at a time, starting with ourselves, can make everything better.
Now there’s hopelessly Pollyanna-ish for you…
Ann
If you would like some editorial help with your novel draft. please do get in touch and we can have a chat. Check out my Facebook Page, at The Accomplice and message me there for more details, or get in touch through my substack email.
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LINKS
Mark Twain’s Eighteen Rules
Here are a couple of useful links from one of my favourite writing blogs. This Itch of Writing, from Emma Darwin
Characterisation in Action
This one, from Steven Pressfield, is thought provoking
Our Characters and Ourselves
As is this one,
Writing Characters who are smarter than us
(Actually this reminds me of one of my favourite John Brunner science fiction novels, The Stone That Never Came Down. In the novel a virus which makes people more intelligent is released into the population - making people faster, and able to connect and have new insights. Weirdly, I always feel a lot brighter after reading it.)
I love this, but I'm going to play devil's advocate and say the people who think they are gods - the Putins, the Johsnons, the Elon Musks - do not read novels like this. They probably don't read novels at all, though (perhaps) they may have been forced to read a few at school. And even if they did, they have none of the brain space to develop empathy and care for those "lesser" beings who provide their wealth/power.
BUT for those of us on the receiving end of their manipulations of the universe, novels give us a means to escape, to understand, to realise there are other ways of doing things. Hence so many novels being banned in so many places: they give us proles ideas and, worst of all, an escape, however temporary. Once we have tasted that freedom, what might we not do?