How to Make Your Characters Feel Real

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Welcome to the Inside Creative Writing podcast, the weekly discussion of craft and technique for writers of fiction and creative nonfiction. And now, here's your host, writer and educator Brad Reed. Episode 2, Keeping Your Characters Alive. Today, we're talking about how to create stories, characters, and settings that come alive for your readers, literally.

Introduction to Verisimilitude

So today, we're talking about keeping your characters alive. Now, I don't mean in a plot sense. We're not talking about whether or not your protagonist lives or dies at the end of your book. What we're going to be talking about today is called verisimilitude. It's the illusion of reality in our writing.

Now, how many of us, after reading a book like Harry Potter, haven't put it down and found ourselves wishing that Harry Potter really was a real person, that Hogwarts was a real place? Well, I want to introduce you to a way of thinking that suggests that, in a way, these characters in books are real. Now, you're going to have to follow me here just a little bit, but I think you may find this compelling. I want to start with just sharing a story about my grandmother, and just bear with me here. This will make sense in a few minutes here.

But I wanted to tell you about my Grandma Evelyn. She grew up in the era of the Great Depression, and lots of people in that time period learned to save things. And my grandma was no different. I remember one year going to visit her. I believe I was turning 12 years old. And she said, oh, you know what?

I've got some cake out in the freezer. You kids want some cake, right? And of course, we kids always wanted cake.

So she brought out this cake from the freezer, and it said, happy birthday, Brad, or happy ninth birthday, Brad. This cake had been in the freezer for three years, if I remember right. So yeah, my grandma loved to save things.

So why am I telling you the story about my grandma? Well, it's a story about a real person, right? Of course it is. You know, she's my grandma.

But what if I told you that I just made that story up? What if I told you that story never happened? What if I told you I never even knew my grandmother?

Now, did it change your experience when listening to know that? In other words, a few minutes ago, as I was telling you that story and it was about a real person, you were experiencing a real person through a story. But if I had made that up and you didn't know it at the time, you'd still be having that exact same experience of what you believed to be a real person.

Now, I know this is a little abstract here, but follow me and let me explain it just a little bit more. Because it's going to lead into today's discussion about the appearance of reality in our writing. See, I believe, and I know this is a little out there, you don't have to go there with me, but I believe that characters in books actually become real in a very real sense in the same way that most people in the world are real.

Now, here's what that is based on. Most people out there in the world, most real people, quote unquote, real people out there in the world, exist for us only in stories. The number of people we actually meet in our lives and know face-to-face is very few compared to the number of real people out there in the world. And when we're reading, when we're reading a well-written book that gives us a character that's real, then we're experiencing that character through stories as well, the exact same way that we experience other real people. And I believe this is why fiction actually works. I think this is the power that fiction has.

It's that ability to suspend disbelief and approach these characters as if they're real, approach these stories as if they're real. And in a way, when we do that, from the reader's perspective, these characters are every bit as much alive as a real person while they're involved in the book. Now, like I said, you don't have to follow me on this. This is just the way I look at it. For me, when somebody's reading my writing, and when I've got it right, when I've created real, feeling characters that are consistent, then I believe in their minds, those characters become sort of real. And in a way, this is maybe pushing it too far if you're not with me still, but in a way, they become even more alive because we can then share that experience with other people who read the book.

In other words, let's say I sat down with a friend of mine and we talked about a mutual friend. Well, we've had different experiences with that mutual friend, so much so that as we sit down and talk about him or her, we might actually be talking about a different person, right? Have you ever had somebody in your life that you have a different relationship with than somebody else and you feel like, you know, you know the same person, but you don't see them the same way at all? Well, in that way, the characters in our books are even more real because we can share that experience with other people. We know them in the same way because we've heard the same stories as they do, as they have. And another power of the fictional real character, if I can use such a phrase, is that we have the ability to bring them back alive.

I keep using the Harry Potter example, not because it's a stellar example of this, I don't think, but because it's simply so widely read and everybody can kind of relate to it. But we can, in a sense, bring characters back alive. I mean, if you go back and pick up the first few Harry Potter books and read them again, suddenly Dumbledore is alive again. You know, it's exciting, it's powerful, and you really do get that sense as you're reading that this character becomes alive in a way in our kind of fictional reality.

The Funnel Concept Explained

Now, in order to do this, in order to create characters that are alive, it takes some writing skill, of course. And that's not what we're going to go into today. We're kind of going to assume that we've got the skill at least to create real feeling characters. The real challenge comes in keeping them feeling real and keeping them alive, so to speak, because we can kill our characters. Not in the plot sense, you know, we're not going to drop a piano on them or give them cancer or any of the other number of ways that characters can die in our plot lines.

But we can kill them by taking a character that is real and alive for a reader and then reminding them that, no, this is not a real person, this is a fictional person. And that's what we're going to talk about today, is the things that we can do, the things that we often do, that kill our characters in that sense, that makes them fictional, that changes them from that real person in their mind who they're experiencing stories about and changes them into simple words on a page, an invention of an author. And I want to approach this by describing to you something that I call the funnel.

Now, this certainly, I'm certainly not the first person to talk about this and probably others have even called it the funnel. I don't know, it's maybe something I've picked up, but it's something that stayed with me and I wanted to share it with you. But I want you to imagine, if you will, your story being like a funnel laid on its side.

So picture that in your mind. You've got the wide end on one side and you've got the narrow end on the other. And then I want you to picture your story as if you're walking through this funnel from the big side to the small side. And as you begin this walk, the funnel is wide open. It's huge. There's plenty of space.

And that represents the degree to which we can introduce different realities. In other words, we have this wide latitude in which our readers are going to suspend their disbelief. We can invent almost anything at the beginning of our stories and our readers are going to just say, oh yeah, okay. You know, we can say this story is in space. And they say, oh, okay, that's fine. Or we can say the story happened in the 1800s, but they had modern technology.

Okay, yeah, that's fine. You know, this story is about talking camels, whatever it is. And they'll say, yeah, that's fine. At the beginning of our stories, our readers have given us this wide, wide latitude in what they're willing to suspend their disbelief about.

But as we move forward in the story, as that funnel gets smaller and smaller, as we've defined our characters more and defined our world more, it gets harder and harder to challenge that reality and therefore easier and easier to do something outside of that reality and kill our characters in that sense of reminding our readers that they're fictional. And we're going to look at some examples of this because I know that's a little abstract. So let's look at what is happening in stories that suddenly kick us out of that reality, suddenly remind us that, hey, this is a work of fiction and there's an author behind it. I want to use an example. It's a very obvious example, and I'm going to go with the movie Up, the Pixar movie Up, again, because hopefully it's something a lot of you have seen as a classic example of how this is done wrong. And then we'll look at some more of the subtle ways.

But the Pixar movie Up, I really like this movie, so don't take my criticism of it as being a condemnation of the whole movie. But at the first, we get some things that are outside reality. You know, the fact that a house can be lifted by a bunch of balloons, you know, probably not. Yeah, I mean, eventually, if reality that we've already suspended, that disbelief that we've already suspended.

So, you know, a lesson that I think we can learn from that really obvious example is that if we don't address unnatural elements early or make them make sense in the story, they're going to destroy the reality of that story. In other words, you know, don't introduce something like time travel halfway into your book. You know, if that's going to be something that's going to come up, you've got to start planning the seeds for that early. You've got to start making that a natural part of that world because if it comes out of left field too far in after that funnel's already narrowed, your reader's not going to buy it. They're going to suddenly remember, oh yeah, I'm just reading a story here. They're going to be zapped out of that place where your characters are real for them, where your story is real for them.

Okay. Like I said, up is a dramatic example, but most of the time it's really, really subtle. And that's, that's what usually gets us because we can, we can either miss that we're doing these things or we can sometime convince ourselves that it's so minor and so subtle that it's not going to matter, that our readers aren't going to catch it. The problem is they do, whether they catch it consciously or subconsciously, I think so much of our reaction and interaction with a story happens on the subconscious level that we're not always aware of it.

Common Pitfalls in Character Realism

So I think we need to pay attention to those things that can even strike our readers on the subconscious level. So I just want to go through six real quick examples of things that make their way into our stories that kill our characters, that remove them from that kind of fictional reality that our readers have created. So here we go.

The first thing is going to be a character who notices something that they wouldn't in reality notice. Now I've got an example of this in the book that I'm working on. I had this scene where my main character sees this girl outside of a store and the way I set up the scene, he's back behind a counter and there's this whole store and then the windows and then there's this girl outside. And as he notices her, he notices her earring and I wanted to, by taking the qualities of this earring, kind of reflect the qualities that she was going to have and I kept working the scene over and over again and it just couldn't, it just never felt right. I couldn't figure out what it was until I got thinking about this, you know, what, what would my character notice? And it occurred to me that she's, she's simply too far away for him to notice that fine of detail in her earring.

And it's something very subtle. It's something that's probably, you know, that most readers wouldn't recognize as they're reading through that quickly, but I think it registers in their subconscious. It's unsettled something in their unconscious that in their subconscious, not their unconscious in their subconscious that undermines the reality of our story.

So it's little things like that that we've got to be, that we've got to be watching for. We've got to make sure that characters in our books are only able to notice the things that they would actually notice. Number two here is a character who does something inconsistent with the person that your reader has come to know. A lot of times this happens because we, we are writers, you know, we, we force our characters to do things in their, in our books. And because of that, sometimes our characters don't have really firm centers. I guess I'll say they're not consistent within themselves and then it's too easy for us as writers to just bend them a little bit to fit a scene.

You know, we need this to happen in the scene. So yeah, maybe this character wouldn't do that, but I'm, I'm just going to force him to be a little different than he has been to fit what I need to accomplish with this scene. Well, that undermines that reality of that character. It's another one of those things that reminds our readers that now this isn't a real person, this is a character the writer has created and it can pull them out of the book. A good rule of thumb for this is that hopefully our, our fiction is all about conflict. I'm going to introduce you to a, a James Scott Bell book a little bit later in this podcast called Conflict and Suspense.

And he does a great job of showing how all fiction is based around conflict, either major conflict or minor conflict. And I think not only does that conflict need to exist on the page, that conflict needs to exist between you and your characters too. In other words, you need to be fighting with your characters to try to, to keep them consistent and yet get them to do what you want them to do. Our fiction should be full of conflict and I think our writing needs to be as well.

In other words, make your characters real to the point that they don't just bend at your whim, that you have to wrestle with them to, to get them to do what you need them to do in your story. The third thing is that a difference in your world from the real world that you haven't prepared your reader for, readers will assume that things not discussed as different are probably the same unless they follow logically from something else. And here's what I mean.

Let's say you're writing a fantasy story and you've done a great job in the first chapter or two of setting up what this world looks like, who can do what, what kind of maybe magic or science fiction kind of elements there are. As your readers move through that story or move into the smaller section of that funnel, so to speak, they're going to assume that anything that you haven't addressed is probably the same as the normal world that they're used to. So we need to be really aware if, especially later in the book, if we're introducing things that aren't part of the normal world, that we've set that up somehow or that they follow logically for something that you've already set up. And a lot of these we're just touching on here. They could be whole, entire podcasts on their own, and maybe at some point I'd love your feedback if any of these you'd like to hear more about. Number four here, and I'll try to get through these a little quicker.

Number four here is characters who don't use the abilities that you've given them. Now this is maybe a pet peeve of mine, but it's one that I see so often that is really jarring for me and it's taken me out of a lot of great stories. And I'll give you a couple of examples here. I mentioned last week that I just finished reading a little bit ago a book called The Golden Compass by Philip Pullman. And in this story, you've got a character Lyra. She is given this almost magical item called an alethiometer.

And it allows her to find out the truth about anything. She gets very, very good at learning how to use this tool to determine the very specific truth about anything. And yet, repeatedly throughout the book, there are opportunities for her to use this thing to find out the truth about something. I think in one instance that comes to mind, she's trying to find something out about this community of bears and she has to go to this old man and try to trick him into telling her this stuff. And the whole time I'm thinking, you've got this alethiometer. It'll take you five minutes.

Go check in with this thing. And it just completely kicked me out of the story because I'm asking myself, oh, why doesn't she use this alethiometer? And of course, the answer is, oh, because Philip Pullman needed to do something else with the story. And I'm reminded that this is a story. Not everything has to make sense. Lyra is not a real person.

Alethiometer doesn't really exist. And I'm taken immediately out of the story. I see this too. I hesitate to mention this because I mentioned it before in conversations and people get really defensive about the Lord of the Rings stuff.

But I see this in the Lord of the Rings movies. There's a scene where Gandalf runs into this battle and the, oh, what are the big black creatures? The Nazgul are just decimating the armies.

But Gandalf runs in and does this big shiny light thing with his staff and they all just scatter. I think, wow, that's an amazing power. Why hasn't he used that before? And then later it comes up too where I think he used your shiny staff light thing, Gandalf, and he doesn't do it. You know, both of these would be so easily explained if you just made this power come at a cost.

In other words, in the Lyra example, if it really took a lot out of her to use this alethiometer so that she was reluctant to use it in places and had to figure out other ways to try to find out what she needed to know rather than go straight to this power that she was given, then suddenly not only is the story more real, but we get more conflict in it too. So anyway, I could go on and on on that one. Like I said, it's a little bit of a pet peeve of mine.

But something to be aware of, you know, if you've given your characters not even supernatural abilities, but just, you know, general abilities, maybe they're very quick-witted or something like that, and yet you don't use that ability later on, your readers are going to notice that, whether consciously or subconsciously. It may be that thing that unsettles that reality. The last two I'll go over fairly quickly because we did talk about them last week a little bit. The fifth one is going to be forced eloquent language. And this is tempting as writers. We want to kind of show off sometimes how we can weave words together and use alliteration like weave words.

And sometimes we do it to our own detriment if our readers are going along and suddenly they're noticing the words on An example of this, again, from my own writing, as I'm working on a short story, and I had, it's about a bus driver who, this is a little kind of a downer for this podcast, but it's about a bus driver who runs over a student as he's pulling away from a bus stop. That's kind of the inciting event for the story. But I had written in here that this bus driver heard this student cry out from the back of the bus. And that too, I could just feel that there was a problem in it, and I couldn't define what it was until I thought about this, and I looked for something subtle, and it was simply the fact that the bus driver wouldn't be able to hear it, over the rumbling of the engine and the noise with the other kids in the distance to the back of the bus. He just wouldn't hear it, and that was working to undermine the reality of that story.

So I had to rework it. The big one that we see is kind of the description thing. We so often introduce a new character by this overly rich description of how they look, what their mannerisms are, what they're wearing.

But here's the question, do you notice every detail of how someone looks when you meet them? Or do you notice every detail of a particular setting that you're in? No, you notice key details. When you first see a person in that first just few seconds, you're going to notice one or maybe two particular things about them. In fact, this is a great exercise. Go somewhere where you can people watch and just go with a little notebook and just watch people for two or three seconds, just glance at them, and then write down the first one or two things that you notice about them.

That's much more real than having our characters meet a new character in a book and suddenly take five minutes and describe every detail of their clothes and how their hair is done and the jewelry that they have on. It's that kind of thing that pulls our readers out of that place of reality. And the final thing here, I'm just going to call check your gut. This to me is the most effective way for me to identify those places where I've undermined the reality of my story. And the way I do this is I just think back over my story and I ask myself, where have I pushed it? Where have I written something that just feels wrong?

I don't even know usually at the beginning that it's a problem with undermining reality of the story, but I just sense something in my gut that there's something wrong. You know, some people have muses that give them story ideas or wonderful characters. I think my muse lives in my gut. And the only thing he says is, I don't know about that. Because that's the feeling I get as I'm writing. I'll write something and I have a little feeling in my gut.

Oh, I don't know about that. And the most effective way I've found to rid my writing of that is to spend some time thinking back over my story, reading over my story, and listening for those places where in my gut it just kind of says, I don't know. I think you've pushed this a little bit here. I want to use one other example. I talked a little bit about my years songwriting last week as well, and I want to use another songwriting example here. And the rule of thumb for this, for songwriting for me, was don't let the song write you.

And what this applied to is sometimes when you're writing a song, you can have this idea of where you want it to go, what you want it to say. And as you're writing it, as you're trying to fit everything into the right meter and the right rhyme, sometimes you'll find a line that just works so beautifully. You know, it's a great rhyme. It's got perfect meter. It just fits into that song like a puzzle piece.

But it doesn't have anything to do with the direction you wanted to go. And it's so tempting at that point to let the song write you. In other words, to say, oh, this rhyme is just so good. This line is just so good. I don't care what I was thinking before. I'm going this direction now.

And suddenly the song starts writing you instead of you writing the song. We can do that in our fiction too. In the book I'm working on right now, I've got one of the characters suffers from gigantism and he stands almost eight feet tall. And I thought it would be great to have this scene where they go to a wax museum and this character moves the, the wax figure out of the scene of the tallest man in history. And he stands there really still and kind of takes his place and then just scares the crap out of people as they come through.

Now that'd be a great scene. It would be so much fun to write. The problem was that it did not fit with his character at all. I mean, this, this guy is very reserved, very nervous around people and it just made no sense.

So as much as I wanted to include it, if I had, that would have been the story writing me. In other words, me saying, I want to write this scene so bad that I'm going to change the trajectory of my story for it. So we've got to be, be wary of that because our readers pick up on that just like, hopefully our guts pick up on that.

So that's what I ask myself a lot of times is where have I let my story write me? Where have I found a joke that I thought it'd be funny or in a piece of imagery that's so good, but even though it doesn't fit the story or the character or the plot or the setting that I've forced it in there anyway. If we leave that stuff in there, it will kill our characters, literally. It will stop them from living in the minds of our readers and they'll just become words on the page. Before I finish with this, I want to do include one little note on names. And maybe this is a pet peeve thing again for me, but I think it's more than just me.

Because something that breaks reality for me are books or stories that take place in the normal world, but everybody seems to have these crazy unique names. I think sometimes as writers, we get to test out all these crazy names that maybe we weren't bold enough to saddle our children with, but we decide that we can name our characters these things. The problem is people don't have crazy names in the real world. If they do, it's maybe one in a group of 20. And yet so often I see these names that just immediately throw me out of a book. And every time I see them, it's like, Oh yeah, this is definitely a piece of fiction.

I can't suspend my disbelief that these are real people. Now you can get away with this in some writing, like futuristic writing. Think of Katniss and Peeta and the Hunger Games. You know, it's futuristic. It works in that sense just fine. Or in fantasy, certainly we have that flexibility.

Just be careful, you know, if you're in this world in this era, make sure that our names reflect that or it can be jarring. And here's the one caveat I want to include in that. Uh, there, there certainly are works of meta fiction. Um, think of a work like Thomas Pynchon's, um, uh, Crying of Lot 49. The names he has in this book are crazy. I mean, he's got Oedipa, who is the female protagonist.

You've got mucho moss spelled M-A-A-S, mucho moss and Pierce Inverarity. Now these names just scream. I'm a fictional person. Well, Pynchon and many of the postmodernist writers are, are doing that intentionally. They're writing meta fiction and their point is to remind us that we are reading a work of fiction. And yet even in that, his characters still become alive because he remains true to who they are throughout that story.

Guidelines for Creating Real Characters

And eventually we kind of buy into that, but, uh, there, there certainly is, there certainly are forms of fiction where we can break some of these rules. So, um, you know, they aren't rules, they're, they're guidelines and really just, uh, warning signs, uh, to keep in mind. So for today's podcast, I really just want to encourage you to create characters, plots and worlds that will actually come alive in the minds of your readers. And then keep that promise sacred to keep those characters alive. Be, be one of those writers that creates real people that actually come alive every time someone else picks up your book.

Recommended Reading and Advice

Okay. For our wise words today, I mentioned James Scott Bell a little bit earlier. He's got some great books on fiction writing. Uh, as part of the write great fiction series, I'd recommend Plot and Structure.

Another book called Conflict and Suspense and a third one, Revision and Self-Editing. He's got others. Uh, these are three that I've read that I've, that I've really gotten a lot out of.

But, uh, here's a quote that I want to share with you from him today. He says, learn always about craft, but when you write, write fast and loose. When you revise, revise slow and cool. You can follow James Scott Bell at Twitter. It's at James Scott Bell. If you've got a favorite quote or a piece of writing advice you'd like to share, check out the website at the show's website.

Weekly Writing Challenge

Click on that talk to us link and we'd love to have your, uh, favorite quote or a pithy writing advice on the show. For our weekly challenge this week, I want you to do a gut check of what you're currently working on. Ask yourself right now, what element you've forced in, even though it doesn't necessarily keep with the reality of the characters or your story and make that thing justify its reason for being there. Can you set it up earlier so that it is real when Let's get some words on paper this week, and we'll meet up again next week for another episode of the show's website. Thanks for listening to the Inside Creative Writing podcast with your host, writer and educator, Brad Reed. We'll be back next week, but until then, join the conversation at the show's website.