This is day eight of twenty-one days of posts between January 10th and January 30th of 2021. Hello again to those who read previous days, and hello to those of you who may have stumbled across this post “out of order”. You should go back and read from Day 1, for a few reasons. It explains why I am doing this. It is the first one, and I may make reference to something in it in this post or a later one. It also has a list with each day’s post (once they are available) and you can jump to whatever topic you are interested in. Thanks for reading!
Creating characters for my books is hard. That is obvious to anyone who has tried, but even if you have never tried to write a book, you have an idea of the difficulty of this process. We are all characters in development. We grow and change based on our experiences, our environment, and our interaction with others. How we change may be strongly dictated by traits we were born with, passed on to us from our parents.
I’m not talking about eye color, hair color, general build, or anything physical, but mental and emotional tendencies. Physical traits are part of the bargain, but they are not the aspects of our “character” I am talking about. I believe we receive a base emotional and mental “shape” from our parents. Everything after birth modifies that shape, good or bad. Bad situations don’t necessarily mean that shape will be detrimentally affected; it all depends on how we learn to adapt and overcome.
But back to fictional characters. Humans are complex beings. Our intelligence and sentience allow us to defy our baser instincts. Trying to create a person and provide form to their character is difficult. You have to decide how the situations you place that character in, and the other characters around them, affects them. Do they tend to run? Do they tend to fight? Do they tend to make peace?
The big question is – What drives them? This is a critical component of the character, especially the main character of a story, and it will have a pivotal influence on how they develop, because characters should develop. Just as we, as real people, should grow and evolve, so should fictional lead characters, otherwise readers aren’t interested in them. If the hero of a story learns nothing, doesn’t change, adapt, or overcome, there is no story.
That’s why it is critical to develop characters, and develop them realistically. If the main character gets to the end of their quest and does something completely out of character, at least, the character you have developed in them over the course of the story, the reader will know it and they won’t like it. Character development must be consistent and remain believable over the course of the story.
Putting all those puzzle pieces together properly is a taxing affair. The character must be exposed to difficult, sometimes terrible circumstances to become the hero they are meant to be in the story. Character development has to be well-paced. The character can’t abruptly learn what they need to know deep into the final act of the story. They have to begin experiencing and learning from page one, or at least whatever page they first show up on.
Subtly weaving these experiences into the narrative to build a character as you would have them to be is hard. It takes planning. It may require lots of editing. As an author, you may finish the entire book, go back and read it, and not believe it. If so, you must awaken your inner editor and get to work on fixing the problem with your character. If not, again, there is no story. No author wants to crank out 150,000 words or so, just to realize that they have no story, just a series of events that happened to someone.
As I already mentioned, we are all characters in progress. The events we experience in this world and the situations and people we encounter all work to shape us, some for good and some for bad. One thing we must realize, as Christians, is that there are aspects of our life we cannot fix. We cannot be good enough. We cannot do enough. We cannot turn our heart of stone into a heart of flesh. Only God, as the supreme author of our fate, can do that. We must allow him to do so.
Lord, help me to realize that You are the supreme author of my life. Only with Your help can I hope to be redeemed, reborn, and reclaimed by You as Your child. Help me to look to You to do this for me, to believe that You can, instead of trying to “behave” without Your help.
Thanks for reading!
Feature Image: Photo by Gülfer ERGİN on Unsplash