On Character: From Draft to Daring - Lauren Daniels

The worst thing in a manuscript isn’t the bad guy. It’s the forgettable character bogged in the clay of the story; the one who, despite a few gurgles, still isn’t much more than words on the page.

We all have them in our works-in-progress: semi-submerged golems with lifeless stares and clichéd one-liners. And it takes all of our grunt to draw these creatures from the goop of our process, hose them down, and prompt them to act with agency.

Whether we’re into fiction or creative non-fiction, we writers aim to urge our characters to leap from draft to daring. We want our readers to love our characters—or love to hate them, or feel anything but indifference!—and there are reams of insights that help us foster this connection.

First, we know audiences don’t want to watch characters—they want to become them. They want to experience the dawning of realisations and metamorphosis of sparkling—or cataclysmic—transformations.

Psychological approaches connect readers with our characters by drawing them into the heart of a scene. We can craft behaviours that attempt to ease internal stress (like denial), gear up our characters for change (like using humour to disempower a bully), and fire up interpersonal exchanges (like verbal humiliation). Major flaws also form the threads that make our characters draw their first authentic breath and sustain them through to resolution.

From another angle, when we know what’s buried deeply within our characters—what they’ve hidden even from themselves—we can unleash this power upon the plot. Repressed, unconscious forces that push through a narrative as manifestations of fear, for example—think Jennifer Kent’s film, The Babadook—crackle with heat.

Also, when we purposely align our characters’ internal conflicts with external obstacles, we craft stories with heaving character arcs. We imagine stories where our characters’ internal conflicts (like lack of confidence) and the plot’s external conflicts (an oppressive environment) shift from an escalating stand-off in the first half of a story into propellants toward the climax (revolution). The pairing of internal and external conflicts can drive our characters into confronting their shortcomings and trying something new, especially when old patterns fail them.

We can identify archetypes within our draft—treasured expressions of unified human experience—like wise women, monsters, warriors—just waiting to reward our readers with profound depths that cross all demarcation lines. Repeating images beg to support our characters as catalysts for motif. Consider the fractured sword, Andúril, reforged in The Lord of the Rings, and the flowers that illuminate Mrs Dalloway.

Lastly, when the writer and the writing blur—when we plunge our hands into the clay of what truly scares, fulfils, and eludes us—we become the very lifelines our characters need to take hold and emerge. That’s when the truly memorable characters begin to speak in a language our readers won’t forget.