Five Ways To Bring Your Characters To Life
How to shape the clay of the people in your book and make them really breathe.
Trying to create convincing characters is one of the hardest parts of writing.
However, these five simple tips will help make your characters come to life.
They might even start to walk around a bit and mumble a few words.
Give Them Contradictions.
It is often pointed out that drama relies on conflict. Conflict, however, is internal as well as external. And it is the internal conflict that is most important.
Humans are divided beings.
They are divided between their conscious and unconscious minds.
They also have a need to be both be social and to achieve their individual aims. As Will Storr puts it ‘Humans are driven to both connect and dominate. That is their central contradiction.’ Humans are built to be both selfish and unselfish and can be pulled in either direction any time. It makes people unpredictable, which is what fascinates about character.
As story expert David Corbett puts it,
‘Contradictions express a seeming paradox of human nature: that people do one thing and exactly the opposite; they’re this, but they’re also that.’
So how can we build a convincing character out of someone who must be recognisably the person they are (through ‘repeated action’ as Aristotle would have it) and their unpredictable part?
It is impossible to be precise about the answer, because it goes again to the heart of the question, ‘what is a person?’. It is the writer’s job to explore that question, not answer it.
Here’s Corbett again on contradiction:
“Simply stated, a contradiction is something about a person that piques our interest because it betrays what we expect, given what else we know or observe about him. We see the two polarities, the contrasting yin and yang of the behaviour, and automatically wonder at the invisible domain that lies between.
“Contradictions are also intrinsically interesting. Our perceptions are instinctively geared toward seeking out what doesn’t fit. This is evolutionarily adaptive: It alerts us to threats. That unexpected sound we hear could simply be the wind in the grass — or a predator approaching. Your normally placid neighbour’s bout of cursing could be nothing — or something you ignore at your peril. The underlying message of every contradiction is: Pay attention”
Other contradictions are based on our need to fulfil widely different social roles, says Corbett.
“ In “Rameau’s Nephew,” Denis Diderot proposed that each of us is obliged to assume multiple personas to fulfil the seemingly endless number of obligations demanded of us. We conduct ourselves appropriately in a variety of different social situations: the dinner table, the office, the chapel, the bedroom. We feel differing degrees of freedom to “be ourselves” in each of these environments, depending on who else is present, our relationship with them, our status. But most people effortlessly navigate such diverse circumstances daily. We are, each of us, masters of contradiction.”
The novelist Junot Diaz has this to say about contradictions
“You need to have a strong sense of how the average person carries their contradictions—for that is what all of us humans have and what often defines our characters—their contradictions. You need to study the contradictions of people around you and think about how certain kind of contradictions could lead certain kinds of characters into certain kinds of trouble. All of this will help in creating nuanced characters. Just always remember the Golden Rule is not that you want characters that you can like or dislike—but characters who we get to understand, a process that allows us to understand parts of ourselves.”
The principle of contradictions may suggest that your character can behave any way the writer feels without sacrificing plausibility. However, contradictions are not random.
As McKee puts it, “ “Character dimensions are consistent contradictions. Not a nice guy who on one occasion kicks a dog “
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