A few years ago I listened to a podcast with Sally Wainwright (I can’t remember which one) in which she said something that to me was a creative game-changer:
Every character in a story is the main character to themselves.
No villain recognises themself as the villain. They can justify their own actions. They have reason to do the things they do.
Making the murderer and rapist Tommy Lee Royce a sympathetic character is no mean feat. When Sally speaks, we listen. I try as much as I can to bring this approach into my own writing. I think the best characters are flawed, vulnerable, sometimes unreliable, and don’t often recognise how they come across. In short: human.
I don’t like when they always do the right thing, make good choices and are super-nice to everybody. I like it when you can see the whites of their eyes, the dark of their souls. If they are compelling enough, you will stay with them through a whole book, which as a writer is all you want. The only goal is to keep the reader reading.
My own protagonists have invariably: killed, threatened, betrayed, wimped out, stolen, given away children, lied, envied…I could go on. But if you are invested in their journey, you will go with them. To make the reader invested you do not have to make them likeable, only real.
So how do you make them real?
Firstly: dialogue. If done well, it brings a character to life. If done badly, it makes them seem flat, 2D, a “character” rather than a person. I prefer to keep dialogue short and avoid long reams of speech, because nobody really talks like this (well… not everyone). On the whole we speak briefly, in short bursts, batting words back and forth, withholding or revealing in every sentence. You can gauge a character’s mood from dialogue.
My favourite way to use dialogue is to leave things unsaid. I find this can tell you more about the person than anything they say themselves. Here is an except from The Household, in which two characters, Martha and Josephine, are sitting in their bedroom, talking.
They both jump as the bedroom door flies open. Frances stands in the doorway, her arms piled with towels. ‘Oh,’ she says. ‘I thought this was the cupboard.’
Josephine takes up her needle and begins picking at the apron.
After a moment, Martha says: ‘The press is just outside. Towels are on the left.’
‘Silly me.’ Frances smiles and lingers. ‘You feeling better? Mrs Holdsworth said you was taken ill.’
‘Much better, thank you. How are you settling in?’
‘Well enough. Everyone seems nice.’ There is a pause.
‘Which room are you in?’ asks Martha.
‘The front one, with Mary-Ann and Lucinda. I’d have gone for this one, if all the beds weren’t took. It has the best view.’
Martha smiles.
‘Can I bring you anything?’ asks Frances. ‘Some tea? I can’t believe all this house has. And it’s all for us.’
‘I know,’ says Martha. ‘You’re very kind, thank you, but no.’
‘All right. I’m to do the bath-water now.’
‘Oh,’ says Martha. ‘I forgot it was Saturday.’
Josephine meddles with the apron long after Frances has closed the door.
This scene is told from Josephine’s point of view. The purpose of it isn’t to go over where things are in the house or find out how Frances is settling in. It isn’t about Martha or Frances at all, though they are the ones speaking. Josephine is the protagonist in this scene, and says the least for a reason. The reader understands she is in conflict about something and, by ignoring Frances, concealing something from Martha and therefore the reader. In this scene she is unreliable, which is compounded further in the next part:
‘What’s the matter?’ Martha asks, frowning and smiling at her.
‘Nothing.’
‘Why were you like that?’
‘Like what?’
‘Unfriendly, just now with Frances.’
‘I wasn’t.’
Martha pulls a face and puts her head back on the pillow with a sigh. ‘I’d forgotten how strange it was to come here and have everything you dreamt of when . . . well, when you didn’t have it. Do you know, I feel as though I’m used to it now, but perhaps that’s a dangerous thing.’
‘What’s dangerous?’
Martha closes her eyes. ‘Having all this given to us. It’s only temporary, after all. Who knows what we will go on to?’
She opens her eyes, looking directly at Josephine, who looks quickly away.
‘I haven’t really thought about it,’ she says, tracing the outline of a rose on the wallpaper.
‘You don’t wonder what might have happened if you hadn’t come here?’
Josephine stares at the wall. ‘All the time.’
A scene like this, told through dialogue, is more impactful than me writing the sentence: “Josephine is having doubts about being in the house.” This relates to “show don’t tell”, another writing rule I try to live by.
Another is differentiating the characters’ manner of speaking so that they have their own distinct voice. Everybody should not speak the same, so that their voices, written down, are indistinguishable. I’m not suggesting that if every character’s name was redacted from the text you ought to be able to tell exactly who is speaking but… almost. You should have a good idea. Angela, who is educated and well-bred, obviously has a different style of speech than the girls in the house. But also she strings longer sentences together. The girls are much more direct and sometimes monosyllabic.
This is more straightforward to do when there are differences in class or education. But if you’re writing about a family all from the same background, the same rule applies. Make their speech different enough that they are instantly recognisable. It’s not just what they say but how they say it. For instance, Martha is warm and engaging; she asks questions and involves people in what she is doing, but she knows when to be quiet, when the other person doesn’t feel like talking. Josephine is more blunt. She is reserved yet fiery: why make a retort when a fierce stare will do?
The character arc
We do not leave characters the same as when we found them. Throw things at them, and have them be dynamic and active (not just reactive) at battling their way through. To use a very clunky metaphor, think of the plot as being an obstacle course which the character must use their wits to navigate. They start the book one person and end it another. I recommend John Yorke’s script-writing book Into The Woods, in which he says we meet characters in stasis: a period of inactivity or equilibrium, where forces are equal and opposed. And stasis = death, i.e. the death of the story. There is a mutual understanding at the beginning of a novel between the reader and writer. The writer introduces the characters in their natural habitats and the reader knows they won’t be in them for long.
Martha is the golden girl: first in the house, liked by everybody, set to succeed.
Josephine is heartbroken after a betrayal. She didn’t want to come to Urania Cottage, has no interest in making friends or bettering herself.
Angela has returned home from travelling. She has invitations and engagements to attend to; everything is easy and calm.
If everything continued like this for all three of them, there would be no story, because how does one change if everything remains the same?
Characters must also impact one another. They aren’t just bumbling along their own tracks without touching one another, like one of those horse race simulators at a fairground. Characters are built from plot. Plot is built from characters. You might have an idea who they are – or who you want them to be – when you begin, but it is necessary to let them impact you, the writer. Fixing them too soon and too resolutely will not serve you. I have tried to make mine do things before that I had planned for them, and then, 40,000 words in, realised they just wouldn’t, or something else would need to happen in order for them to do such a thing. Allowing them to evolve, adding layers, chapter by chapter, is one of the joys of character.
In my newsletters from April I will go into a lot more detail about characters and shaping them. In the meantime, I really enjoyed this article by One Day author David Nicholls about how he wrote the novel. He tried several iterations of the two protagonists before landing on Emma and Dexter, and I love this description of character:
I’m always sceptical of the idea of characters “coming to life”, “becoming real” or “taking over”, because writing is about construction, but I did grow to know them better, to love them and to be maddened by them, in the same way that our best friends can sometimes frustrate us without ever jeopardising the friendship.
Bingeing One Day made me think about character yin and yang, when they have opposing characteristics. Essentially, for characters to work best in context, they must rub up against one other at times, with each possessing qualities that the other lacks. In One Day, Emma is awkward, spiky, intellectual. Dexter is expansive, hedonistic, happy to coast along. Like in all the best romances, they are from different worlds. It can happen in real life – shy people can be drawn towards a more extroverted friend, or the person who tells the jokes pairs up with the person who laughs at them. It can even inspire a sense of envy or desire. In The Household, Martha admires how Josephine doesn’t care what people think of her (of course she does but she doesn’t appear to), and Josephine wishes she was naturally friendly and welcoming like Martha, who takes new girls effortlessly under her wing.
I use these words a lot, but tension and irony must come into play. There is who they are privately vs who they present to the world. Nobody loves a character who is perfect. Making them vulnerable to the reader is a good idea. Who are they in private? What do they think about in the small hours? What are they pushing down?
And maybe the most important question: what is is they want? They don’t need to know right away, and we don’t either. But there must be a sense of something missing from their life, something they might not be able to name or put a finger on. Sometimes this is called motivation. It could be love. It could be peace. It could be autonomy. An answer. Family. Security. Revenge. Forgiveness. Proving themselves. It doesn’t – or rarely – works if they don’t want anything, if they’re just there.
The three Ds, then. Dynamic, dialogue, desire. Balancing all three will round out your characters, and have them leap out of the book instead of sitting flat on the page.
Next week: location, location, location.
Also, this week the five year anniversary edition of The Familiars is published! You can buy a copy in WH Smith’s in Richard and Judy’s picks before they’re rolled out to replace the previous edition. Here she is – plus there’s the first chapter of The Household in the back. Enjoy, and thanks for reading.