Keeping Your Characters Alive

These are the show notes for this episode rather than a transcript. They come from the outline used to record it, so the show itself goes further in places.

This one isn't about plots, or whether your protagonist lives or dies at the end of your book. It's about verisimilitude: the illusion of reality in our writing.

Your characters really are alive

Don't you wish Harry Potter were real? Well, in a sense he is.

• Most people in the world, other than close friends and family, exist for us only in stories
• While a reader is inside the book, our characters are real in exactly that way. This is why fiction works at all
• From the reader's perspective, they are every bit as alive as a "real" person, and sometimes more so, because the experience is shared with other readers
• They can even be brought back. (See: Dumbledore.)

The harder job isn't creating characters who feel real. It's keeping them that way.

How we kill our characters

Not in the plot sense. In the verisimilitude sense, by doing things that remind readers we're making it all up.

The funnel. Readers give us enormous latitude at the beginning of a story. That latitude shrinks as we establish the world and its characters. The longer the story runs, the more the reader knows, and the less open they are to anything outside what you've set up.

Take Up. At first it's fine that a house can be lifted by balloons. Dogs wearing collars that let them speak? Okay, fine. But when they start flying planes, late in the story, with nothing preparing us for it, the spell breaks. Could it have worked if it were set up early? Probably. If you don't address unnatural elements early, or make them make sense within the story, they destroy reality. Don't introduce time travel halfway through.

That's a dramatic example. Usually it's subtle:

• A character notices something they realistically wouldn't notice, like an earring from across the store
• A character does something inconsistent with who the reader has come to know
• A difference between your world and the real one that you haven't prepared the reader for. Readers assume anything not mentioned as different is the same
• Characters who don't use the abilities you've given them, especially in fantasy. (Lyra and the alethiometer in The Golden Compass. Make it difficult for them.)
• Forced "eloquent" language
• Too much description, or information dumping

You can get away with it once or twice. Not really more than that.

How to avoid it

First readers help, but may not catch it. They may not even consciously notice.

Re-read critically, and be true to your perspective. In first person or limited third, only notice what the point-of-view character can and would notice.

• Can: don't let them hear something from impossibly far away
• Would: you don't notice every detail of a person or a place. You notice a few key details

Try this: go people-watch and write down only the first two things you notice about a person, and about the place. That's how we actually experience the world.

Check your gut. Think back over your story and let your instinct tell you where you've included something wrong. Where have you let the story write you? Usually it's a joke or an image so good that you kept it even though it doesn't fit the character, plot, or setting. It will kill your character. They stop living in the reader's mind and become words on a page.

A note on names. This one breaks reality for me: books set in the ordinary world with wildly unusual names. You can get away with it in futuristic or fantasy settings (Katniss, Peeta) but be careful in this world and this time.

The caveat: works of metafiction, like Thomas Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49. Oedipa, Mucho Maas, Pierce Inverarity. Pynchon is deliberately reminding us we're reading fiction, and his characters still come alive, because he stays true to them.

So create characters, plots, and worlds that come alive in your readers' minds, then keep that promise sacred. Be one of those writers who creates real people who come alive again every time someone picks up the book.

Wise Words

From James Scott Bell, author of the Write Great Fiction series:

"Learn always about craft, but when you write, write fast and loose. When you revise, revise slow and cool."

Weekly Challenge

Do a gut check on what you're working on right now. Ask yourself what element you've forced in, even though it doesn't quite keep with the reality of the characters or the story, and make it justify its reason for being there.

Can you set it up earlier so it feels real when you arrive at it? Can you modify it so it's in harmony with the world you've built? Or does it need to go, regardless of how funny, how clever, or how genius it is? If it comes at the cost of killing the verisimilitude of your story, it isn't worth it.

Remember, the best way to improve your craft is by writing. That's what I'm going to go do, and I hope you're off to do the same.