Dynamic Characters

1. Character is Plot: The Core Principle

''Character is plot.''

Henry James's insight. The fundamental connection between who a character is and what happens in the story is paramount. Plot isn't just a series of events; it's the consequence of characters' natures, choices, and reactions interacting with circumstances. Understanding this link is crucial for creating compelling fiction.

Inseparable elements. Characterization isn't a layer added after the plot is built; it's woven into the very fabric of the narrative. What characters do, how they respond to challenges, and the decisions they make must stem organically from their individual personalities, motivations, and flaws. A different character in the same situation would create an entirely different plot.

Generating conflict. Characters' desires, fears, values, and contradictions inherently create conflict, which is the engine of plot. A character driven by ambition will face different obstacles and react differently than one driven by fear of failure, leading to distinct story paths. The internal landscape dictates the external journey.

2. Strong Characters Drive Reader Interest & Writer Enthusiasm

No book was ever harmed by having interesting, layered characters—but many are never published because they don't have them.

Beyond exciting events. While thrilling plots can initially grab attention, compelling characters provide deeper engagement and staying power for readers. Editors and readers alike are drawn to books that offer more than just action; fascinating characters add another layer of appeal, making the book stand out. A great plot with flat characters is less powerful than a great plot with memorable ones.

Fueling the writer. Creating original, complex characters is essential for the author's own motivation during the long process of writing a novel. Writers must believe in their characters' reality and care about their fates to sustain the effort required. This personal investment translates into more convincing and vibrant characters on the page, which readers will sense and respond to.

Memorability and love. The most beloved characters in literature are those who feel real and palpable, staying with readers long after the book is finished. Creating such characters is a primary goal for many writers, as these are the characters that make books not just read, but reread and cherished. This enduring connection is a testament to the power of strong characterization.

3. External Details Reveal Inner Personality

The key is to choose your first descriptive details carefully.

First impressions matter. Readers form initial judgments about characters based on external descriptions like appearance, dress, and mannerisms. These details should go beyond a simple police report style ("Caucasian male, 27...") to create a vivid visual image that also hints at the character's inner self and individuality. The right details grab attention and make the reader want to know more.

Strategic choices. Authors select specific external details to suggest personality, temporary situations, or relationships.

• Appearance: Scarlett O'Hara's square jaw suggests steel beneath femininity.
• Dress: Jenny Fields' sensible uniform reflects her sensible nature; Dominique Francon's subtle suit indicates disdain.
• Mannerisms: Habitual gestures like fast walking or head bending reveal inner states.
• Environment/Tastes: Kinsey Millhone's sparse apartment shows her loner nature; Bond's martini preference suggests precision.

Show, don't just tell. Instead of stating a character is "sour and bitter," show it through their frown, the lines on their face, and their internal thoughts about the world around them. External details, chosen artfully, provide concrete evidence for the reader to infer personality, making the character feel more real and believable.

4. Internal Landscape: Thoughts, Fears, and Desires

What I think, I am.

Beyond outward actions. To truly know a character, readers must be privy to their internal world: their thoughts, attitudes, fears, longings, and neuroses. Characters without an inner life feel like automatons; those with rich internal landscapes are lively, interesting, and absorbing, making them easier for the writer to develop and the reader to connect with. The content of a character's thoughts reveals their habitual preoccupations and worldview.

Peripheral vs. plot-driving thoughts. Internal thoughts can serve different functions.

• Peripheral thoughts: Seemingly irrelevant musings (like Doug Hoover's thoughts on motels) subtly confirm character traits like secretiveness or escapism. These should usually be brief unless exceptionally interesting.
• Plot-driving thoughts: Reactions to story events that propel the narrative forward. A character's "attitude problem" or a sudden realization can be key to understanding their journey and potential for change.

Fear and love as motivators. Deep-seated fears (of abandonment, failure, not being in control) and powerful loves (for a person, an idea, a place) are universal human drives that can generate significant plot conflict. Characters' habitual ways of dealing with these core emotions—avoidance, compulsion, clinging, sacrificing—provide fertile ground for developing dramatic incidents and revealing personality under pressure. Understanding what a character fears or loves, and how they react, is a powerful tool for the writer.

5. Background, Occupation, and Names Shape Identity & Generate Plot

Place of birth is a lot more than just a phrase on your driver's license application. It's a clue to character.

Roots run deep. A character's birthplace and background (social class, regional subculture, family values) leave indelible marks on their personality, speech, tastes, and worldview, even if they've left home. These formative experiences provide external signs of origin (accent, dress) and complex inner perspectives that enrich believability. Exploring a character's relationship to their background—whether they embrace, reject, or are ambivalent about it—can reveal deep-seated conflicts.

Work defines life. A character's occupation is a crucial aspect of their identity, showing how they spend their time, invest energy, and pursue dreams (or not). The right job can:

• Characterize the protagonist (attitude towards work, skill level).
• Gain credibility for the author (realistic details).
• Provide plot ideas (job duties creating conflict or opportunity).
  Knowing why a character does their job (necessity, dream, parental pressure) and how they feel about it (love, hate, indifference) reveals much about their self-image and worldview.

Names carry weight. A character's name—ethnic background, parents' choices, self-chosen nicknames, names given by others—can contribute to world-building, characterization, and plot. Names reflect heritage, family values, and how a character is perceived or wishes to be perceived. Reactions to names can even fuel plot developments, as characters embrace or try to escape the meaning attached to them.

6. Dialogue and Internal Monologue Define Character Voice

Good dialogue characterizes, sounds natural and flows well.

Speech reveals self. Dialogue is a powerful tool for showing readers who a character is, both intellectually and emotionally. Instead of the author labeling a character, their words can directly convey their prejudices, aspirations, worldview, and personality quirks. Even routine interactions can be used to differentiate characters through their unique diction, rhythm, and slant on the world.

Thoughts have style. Just as dialogue has a distinct voice, a character's internal thoughts should reflect their personality through diction, sentence structure, and level of sophistication. Matching the style of thoughts to the character makes them feel more real and consistent with their spoken words. The closer the narrative point of view is to the character, the more the author's language should subtly reflect the character's way of thinking and perceiving the world.

Artifice for effect. While good dialogue seems natural, it's actually artificially concise and edited compared to real speech, removing repetitions and digressions to be more informative and engaging. Similarly, presenting thoughts requires careful mechanics (italics, tags, tense) and managing distance to ensure clarity on whose thoughts they are. Both dialogue and thoughts must be crafted to serve characterization and plot, not just mimic reality.

7. Strategic Omission Enhances Character Focus

Sometimes leaving out ingredients usually considered necessary results in a purer, more focused, more original story.

Less can be more. You cannot include every detail you know about a character; choosing what to leave out is as important as choosing what to include. Omitting certain elements can paradoxically draw attention to what is missing, creating emphasis and forcing the reader to engage more deeply by filling in the gaps. This requires artful selection of details.

Impact of omissions:

• Leaving out description: Can make characters seem subtly disconnected from their surroundings, reflecting their internal state (Carver).
• Leaving out dialogue: Shifts emphasis to setting and authorial observation, suggesting characters are products of their environment (Cheever).
• Omitting specific details (like names or genders): Can highlight the significance of the missing information and challenge reader assumptions (Williams, Merril).
• Leaving out explicit motivations: Forces the reader to infer why a character acts, leading to deeper engagement with their personality (Drabble).

Genre expectations. What details can be omitted depends partly on genre conventions. Romance readers may expect detailed descriptions of appearance and clothing, while thriller readers prioritize action and technical accuracy. Understanding your audience's expectations helps determine which omissions will enhance the story and which will frustrate readers.

8. Adapting Real People and Events Requires Transformation

Fiction is not about what really happened. It's about what seems so real that it's happening now, as you read the story.

Reality is messy. Real life is often too random, inexplicable, and lacking in coherent patterns to translate directly into compelling fiction. Basing characters or plots on real life requires transforming the facts to create narrative drive, emotional truth, and thematic resonance. Simply stating "it really happened" is not a defense for implausible fiction.

Transforming real people. Using real individuals as models requires significant disguise, not just changing names or superficial traits.

• Alter personality elements: Highlight traits that serve the story, delete irrelevant ones, add new ones.
• Combine models: Blend aspects of multiple people or add aspects of your own personality.
• Focus on internal life: Invent plausible motives, fears, and desires that drive the character's actions, even if the real person's motives were unknown or different.

Transforming real events. Real-life incidents must be reshaped to fit fictional demands for mounting tension and clear motivation.

• Rearrange events: Create a pattern of increasing pressure leading to a climax.
• Invent motives: Provide clear, understandable reasons for characters' actions, even if the real-life motives were unclear.
• Add elements: Introduce characters or situations (like a serious suitor in Looking for Mr. Goodbar) to heighten stakes and create choices that drive the plot towards an inevitable, yet dramatic, conclusion.

9. Villains and Unsympathetic Characters Need Depth

A villain is ''a character who from motives of selfish gain knowingly seeks to injure, kill or loot another person.''

Beyond simple evil. While some stories don't require villains, those that do benefit from antagonists who are more than one-dimensional stereotypes. Effective villains, even if morally repulsive, need substance, complexity, and plausible motivations to be believable and menacing. A wimpy or unbelievable villain undermines the hero's struggle.

Types of villains:

• Accidental: Driven to evil by a fatal flaw (Macbeth, Gene Forrester). Requires setting up the flaw early and showing the character's internal conflict.
• Examined: The protagonist of their own story, whose psychology is explored (Barry Lyndon, The Butcher's Boy). Often a POV character, requiring added complexity beyond the stereotype and self-justification.
• Surprise: Introduced sympathetically before their evil is revealed (Willoughby, Rebecca). Requires careful foreshadowing and ensuring both sides of their personality are plausible together.
• Over-the-top: Exaggerated, colorful figures for action-oriented plots (James Bond villains, King's Walking Man). Relies on novelty, imagination, and matching evil to hero's weaknesses.
• Mundane: Evil out of stupidity, weakness, or selfishness (Captain Queeg, Bob Ewell). Hardest to write, requiring all the techniques of characterization to make their banality horrifyingly real.

The villain check. A good test is whether you could write a book from the villain's perspective. This requires understanding their history, fears, loves, and self-justifications. Giving villains substance makes the conflict more compelling and the story richer.

10. Character Change is the Heart of Many Stories

The more things change, the more they stay the same... But in a short story or novel, change is precisely what you must have if the fiction is to work...

Beyond situation change. While some stories focus solely on external problems being solved (situation-change novels), many compelling narratives involve characters who grow or transform. This character change can be the primary engine of the plot and the source of the story's meaning. It distinguishes main characters from static secondary ones.

Types of change narratives:

• Situation-change: Plot resolves external problem; characters remain static (many TV series, some genre fiction). Requires exciting plot and colorful characters to compensate for lack of internal growth.
• Reader-change: Characters remain static, but the reader's perception or understanding of them or the world changes (Walter Mitty, Babbitt). Requires keen psychological insight and strong prose.
• Character-change: Protagonist undergoes internal transformation (Scrooge, Rick Luban). The most common type in contemporary novels, offering readers the pleasure of witnessing growth.

The four-step process for plausible character change:

1. Preparation: Show the character's capacity for change through past behavior or present latent qualities.
2. Pressure: Apply sufficient external or internal conflict to force the character to confront their need to change.
3. Realization: The moment of internal shift, often best portrayed subtly through action rather than explicit thought.
4. Validation: Concrete actions or external confirmation that demonstrate the change is real and likely permanent.

11. Secondary Characters Solve Plot Problems & Add Color

Secondary characters, on the other hand, are non-weight-bearing walls.

Supporting the structure. While main characters are the foundation, secondary characters are essential for building the rest of the novel's structure and adding detail. They cannot be as fully developed as protagonists due to space and pacing constraints, but they serve vital functions in advancing the plot and enriching the narrative world. Over-developing secondary characters can make a book too long, slow, and muddy.

Categories and purpose:

• Main: Fully developed, capable of change.
• Secondary: More than furniture, but static; can be "ordinary" or "colorful." Colorful ones are more memorable and require accounting for at the end.
• Bit players: Appear briefly, serve immediate plot needs.

Fixing second-draft issues. Secondary characters are easier to alter than protagonists and can be used strategically during revision to solve common plot problems:

• Accounting for missing main characters: Have a secondary character provide information about their fate.
• Undermotivated actions: Alter a secondary character's history or interaction with the protagonist to provide a plausible reason for the protagonist's action.
• Implausible situations: Give secondary characters backgrounds or roles that enhance the believability of the main plot events.
• Insufficient foreshadowing: Insert new scenes with secondary characters that hint at the climax.
• Thin sections: Expand the roles or crises of secondary characters to add interest and depth.
• Cliche scenes: Use secondary characters' unique reactions or perspectives to add freshness.
• Unattached subplots: Create or alter secondary characters to forge connections between different plotlines.

12. Archetypes Provide Universal Frameworks

This chapter could just as easily have been titled ''Common Plot Patterns—and the People Who Live Them.''

Universal stories and characters. Archetypes are fundamental patterns embedded in human culture and psychology, offering ready-made frameworks for plots and characters. They are not inherently cliches but powerful, recognizable structures that can feel fresh when inhabited by original characters or placed in novel situations. They tap into deep human understanding and resonance.

Archetypal plots (examples):

• The Journey Home: Character leaves home, finds new place wanting, returns with new appreciation ("City Mouse," Dorothy, Shevek).
• The Chase: Pursuit of a person or group (Hunt for Red October, Les Miserables).
• The Quest: Search for an object, place, or intangible knowledge (Holy Grail, Grapes of Wrath, The Razor's Edge).
• The Competition: Rivals vie for the same goal (Becket, The Sea of Grass, courtroom dramas).
• The Romance: Lovers face obstacles (Romeo and Juliet, Kramer Versus Kramer).
• The Sacrifice: Protagonist gives up something valuable for others (Sydney Carton, Norma Rae).
• The Revenge: Character is wronged and seeks retribution (Carrie, Hamlet).
• The Atonement: Character wrongs another and seeks to make amends (Saint Maybe, Lord Jim).

Archetypal characters (examples):

• The Obsessed: Driven by desire beyond laws/morals (Macbeth, Captain Queeg, Becky Sharp).
• The Underdog: Fights with fewer resources (David vs. Goliath, Cuckoo's Nest patients).

Inspiration, not limitation. Recognizing these archetypes can provide a strong starting point for generating plot ideas and character motivations. By understanding the core pattern, writers can then focus on adding unique details, twists, and emotional depth to make their version feel original and compelling to contemporary readers.

Last updated: May 19, 2025