Greetings my tryptophan-hungover scriveners. Today I want to talk to you, again, about characters. The experience of writing this blog has been both fun and enlightening. There is perhaps no greater truth than if you want to learn more about a subject you know, you should try to explain it to others. Blogging on the writing process has brought to light some of the things I think are important, both as helpful techniques to perfect your craft, and red flags and warning bells to tell you when you are approaching a trap that will delay your progress. I found that through writing about process I have returned several times to how we as writers approach characters. Before I elaborate, though, I need to mention once again the absurdity of “teaching” writing and how nebulous and ambiguous that path can become.

When I realized that this latest installment was once again going to concern character, I hesitated. Surely there must be something else to talk about involving process. So, I googled “fiction elements,” just to give me a tangible list of the different facets of story and perhaps shock my system into talking about setting, or plot or point of view. The first five results google returned were as follows:

The Seven basic elements of fiction.

The Nine basic elements of fiction.

How to Use the Five elements of fiction to create a masterful story

The Six elements your fiction story must contain.

The four elements that are the building blocks of every fiction story.

What a surprise. No consensus. Can we extrapolate that there are at least four elements since that seems to be the lowest common denominator? Maybe.

Obviously, Google didn’t help much so I decided to run with my initial idea. The contents of this week’s observation stems from some personal things going on in my life that do not involve writing, but relationships, and perhaps that is why I am obsessing over character, but whatever the catalyst was, I stand by the fact that if I was to become a shill for a book I wrote telling you how to magically write a bestselling book or screenplay using my formula, it would be titled, “There is Nothing More Important Than Character,” or perhaps, “Character is Everything.”

To that end, if character is the end-all-be-all of story, it tends to follow that knowing your characters would be as vitally important to telling your story as inhaling is to continuing to live.

Ultimately, every story is about relationships. How the characters relate to the world, their friends and enemies, how they cope with their conflicts is the entire point of every story.

I recently exited (was ejected, actually) from a long-term relationship. There were many factors that contributed to its demise, but the one that I think is most pertinent is that now, on the outside looking in, I realize that there was a huge part of the other person that I just didn’t see. I am not going to cast blame here but suffice it to say that communication sometimes was a problem and leave it at that. I was very surprised to find out that we were both in wholly different emotional places regarding the relationship.

If I transfer that feeling over to writing and the way people approach story and character, I can use the analogy of acquaintances and friends. For this exercise we will consider a friend as someone you know, whom you have seen at both their best and their worst and you accept them and support them and feel supported and accepted in turn. Most importantly, though everyone reacts uniquely to situations that arise, you feel like you can safely predict how they would respond to a given stimulus, even if that response is far out of the norm for someone else. For instance, I had a friend who could not deal with seeing anything involving eyes. Even someone rubbing their eyes made this person uncomfortable, forget contacts, or eye pokes or horror movies involving eye injuries. Her reaction was intense, and not particularly common, but it was expected if you knew her.

Now I must speak a bit about Dunning-Kruger. The Dunning-Kruger effect concerns the fact that many people who lack basic intelligence do not know that they lack it because they do not have the cognitive tools to understand that they lack it. To put it bluntly, they are too dumb to realize they are dumb. The corollary to this rule is that very intelligent people tend not to realize how intelligent they are because they can’t comprehend someone who doesn’t possess the cognitive capabilities that they possess. They literally can’t believe someone can be that dumb.

I mention this because the very nebulousness of the writing process makes it ripe for an analogous Dunning-Kruger-type response. Specifically, when I write, my characters come alive in my head. Now, I know I have written on the different levels of writing and how the highest level is similar to taking dictation, but what I am saying now is that, for me, even the lowest level of basic fiction writing has the characters living and breathing in my head. Even the vaguest character, where I only have an amorphous blob of an idea who they are, will tell me things about themselves as I write them that I wouldn’t have guessed. A jaded, clinical person will say that I am ascribing sentience and freewill to certain sequences of neurons firing in my brain, and I have no defense to that. We are the single infinite source of our creations. If god exists, there cannot be anything that exists that isn’t god. If your story exists, there is nothing in that story that is not you. However, it still feels like this character is creating itself. The important part is that the character is living, and we are having a discussion, we are interacting. For me, when I am “stuck” in a story, it is because the character has just stopped letting me know where we are going, or I can see that the bridge is out ahead and I have to figure out a detour. Still, though, there is a bridge, and there is water under the bridge, and the character is sitting with their arms folded saying, “Well, what now?” and I am looking back going, “you’re asking me?”

Recently there has been a trend on social media to discuss the fact that there are people who exist that have no inner monologue. Frankly, it is unthinkable to me. I mean that literally. I cannot comprehend how thought happens without chatter in your brain. However, it does and people with no inner monologue live normal lives and they can’t comprehend what it is like to have a never-ending voice chattering in your head. They think it would be maddening—and as we who have it know, they are right. At times it is insufferable.

So, when I am giving advice or feedback to people and they are stuck on story and plot and those things, I tend to scratch my head just a bit. I wonder if the problem is that they are keeping their characters at arms’ length. Those of us who commute or work in a large office know that we have recurring people in our lives that we see every day, but we really don’t know. The woman who does her makeup on the train and how fascinating it is that she can put on eyeliner while the train is rocking down the tracks. The guy who sits in the corner seat and reads the paper. The woman who says hello every morning on the elevator. We can see these people every day for weeks, months, years, and if we are writers we can—and will—give them imaginary histories. The man in the corner seat obviously must get on at the first stop to get the same seat consistently every day. He reads the financial section, so he is probably a broker, or a day trader. The woman in the elevator has been consistently gaining weight, so maybe she is pregnant. No ring so not married. Maybe she just had a bad breakup and is compensating food for sex.  We as writers can plot out all these peoples’ lives, but in the end, we don’t really know them. If we want to continue their history, we must make it up whole cloth. Yet, if we really wanted to know them, we would engage them. When we engage them, half our burden is gone because they will volunteer their stories to us. To go back to my own process, what I mean about even lowest lever writing is that whether you want to say that the traits and appearance I give my characters are neurons firing or the muse hooking me up to a cosmic channel, when I am engaged, creating the character is easier for me, then sitting clinically checking off those traits as if I were constructing a robot.

I will once again give the disclaimer that my way is not the way or your way. However, for me, I believe that there is a difference between analyzing a character and writing a character. When you analyze, you create a forty-year-old attorney with a gambling addiction who has a trophy wife and a daughter caught up in drugs and promiscuity because she has daddy issues due to his workaholic tendencies. That is a robust, if cliched character, but what else do you know about him? How do we change this blatant cliché’ into someone real that anyone would care about? The only way for me to do it is to ride to work with him or stand with him while he gives a closing summation, or cry and rage with him while he bails his daughter out of jail. Then I will find out that he was raised in the poor section of town and had nothing but karo syrup to eat for weeks at a time and vowed he would never be poor and that even a five-figure attorney salary isn’t enough to compensate for that past so he heads to Vegas and to bookies to try to hit it big. Or that even though he chose his wife because she was a status symbol, he fell hopelessly in love with her and she thinks he is the greatest guy in the world.

The woman in the elevator, once you wish her a great day, and tell her she is looking particularly happy today (whether she is or not), will tell you that her anti-depression meds are working and she is grateful except for the fact that she has gained thirty-five pounds since starting them. But she doesn’t want to stop because after she lost her sister to cancer, she was suicidal and doesn’t want to go back to that place in her mind. Now she is real to you, and now any extrapolations you make when you see her are based on a history that gives you direction. Of course, it limits you as well. You can’t imagine that she is a method actress gaining weight for a role, or because she is in the witness protection program. Now when she begins to drop weight, but starts to neglect her appearance and wears the same dress two days in a row, or only has one earring, you can’t imagine she had a torrid one-night stand and is doing a walk of shame. In the end, though, the character I just drew for you now has a certain momentum, a certain trajectory. You can change that trajectory any time, but what I am saying is it is a matter of literary physics. Objects at rest tend to stay at rest. Objects in motion tend to stay in motion.  Think of it as a pushing a dead car to the side of the road. When you first start to push, there is a whole lot of resistance, but once the car starts to move it takes less effort to keep it moving. A character bio sheet, or a bunch of notes outlining a character is an object at rest. You still must get them moving and they will resist. Your attorney with a gambling problem having to tell his wife that he can’t pay the mortgage this month is in motion. If you write in real time him saying, “honey we need to talk,” his beautiful wife is right there, rolling through a thousand possibilities from death to divorce until he says what the actual problem is. She will react and the scene has momentum.

You get the point. Perhaps what I am saying has to do with the abstract versus the empirical, and I will leave you with this example from my life.

My ex-girlfriend DM’d me the other day to say, “I’m sorry I hurt you.”  She wasn’t trying to get back together or having second thoughts. She was just expressing her regret that what she thought was best for her caused me pain. A friend of mine, when I asked advice about it, told me that we have to accept people’s apologies graciously if we believe they come from an honest place. I do believe my ex’s was coming from that place, and so abstractly, the right and good thing to do was to be gracious and thank her for acknowledging my pain and still caring on a human level if not a romantic one.  And so, I did thank her, and, abstractly, it felt good to rise above the hurt and resentment and still be able to be friends with a wonderful person whom I shared a decade of memories with. However, empirically, in my heart, and in my flowing tears and in my entire being, it hurt. It hurt terribly, and I didn’t know what to do with the pain for a little bit. I suppose some of it was channeled here, to you, my turkey-stuffed disciples. I hope you forgive me my personal indulgences. The bottom line is if you want to write interesting, complex stories, you need interesting, complex characters. I don’t think you can find them in a character bio worksheet that ticks off the traits you need to further your story idea, just as I don’t think you can find a friend by noting the everyday behaviors of a stranger on the train. Unless you write your characters in real time, unless you reach out your hand and say hello, they will never be your friends and they will never tell you their secrets. They will just be long-time acquaintances.

Happy holidays my friends. Keep writing.