Character driven fiction is
something I’ve always aspired to and something I value in the books that I
read. There’s nothing worse, I find, than reading a book where a character’s
actions don’t fit with their personality. It jars so badly it can completely
throw my focus and if it happens too often my interest also wanders and before
you know it the book is down and I’m done. So what are my personal (and I’m not
an expert on the matter) thoughts behind how this happens.
Lack of experience
A lot of writers when starting
out (myself included) underestimate the need for a fully developed skill set.
After all, writing is easy, you just put your words down on the page and viola
– Story. Wrong. Oh so wrong. With the best will in the world you can’t just sit
down one day and write the best novel ever written if you don’t practice. So
put down that manuscript and grab a pen and just write, not even necessarily
full stories just write scenes. You don’t have to worry about getting your
story right you’re just learning how to bring realism to your interactions and
descriptions. You should also be absorbing as much as you can from other
sources. Read other books vary the authors so you don’t get sucked into a
particular style that may not suit you and (shock horror) grab a TV remote.
Some people may not agree with this but growing up I was a Telly addict and TV
is all about characters. You can’t have a good show (especially a series) with
inconsistent characters. Watch and learn, and even write about characters you
see on TV as practice (I’ll talk about this a bit more in another post).
Rigid storyline
So you have an Awesome plot,
it’s got everything a story could want and your characters WILL stick to it.
With exactly the right characters this can work, but more often than not it
will end up with a ‘train track’ story. i.e you’ll feel like you’re on rails
being dragged along inexorably and it may lack for connection. For gamers out
there if any of you have ever played Res Evils the Umbrella Chronicles on Wii you’ll
know what I mean. It was a point and shoot where you didn’t direct the
character you just moved along like you were on some ghost train ride shooting
things as they went past. It was dull and frustrating. If you have to break
your characters to suit the story the way you want it then you’ll loose your
audience. Example from my own work. If your character is habitually drawn into
poor abusive relationships and has come to expect that level of treatment, why
would you expect her to gather up her things and walk out of a flat in the
middle of the night when a new boyfriend starts acting a little off? She
wouldn’t she’d stay and try to work out what she’d done wrong. I laboured over
that niggle for about a year before I stopped making her leave and it worked
out so much better. This brings me onto my last point.
Not understanding your
characters.
Characters, or at least main
characters, are not just puppets. They’re people, imaginary and invisible but
still people with their own thoughts and motivations, and they will surprise
you. As stated above stick them in a rigid storyline that doesn’t fit them and
you’ve got problems. You need to get to know your characters. It’s best if at
all possible to stop even calling them characters but refer to them by their
names. Think about them wherever you are put them in all sorts of outlandish
situations and see how they react. Some people talk to their characters but I prefer
to remain an unobtrusive presence in their world and watch them talking to one
another. A well nurtured character will develop a rich back story and their
reactions will flow naturally lending your story a far more realistic quality.
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