Fleshing Out Characters

When a story gets stuck, I try to see it as an invitation. Amid the frustration, I seek what I have missed. What central element have I bypassed in this story that makes it tick slower, slower, slow until it halts?

Often for me, the culprit is the undeveloped character. I plan the story and begin to write, then realize that what I thought I knew about my characters is actually too thin. In today’s post, I’ll share my way of building up characters that start to “write themselves,” as the buzzword goes. We’ll see.

Characters Drive Literary Fiction

Literary fiction often (though certainly not always) engages the reader though nuanced, complex characters that come to resemble real people. As opposed to more externally-focused action, the action in these stories draws on the contradictions and complexities of people’s minds.

Their central conflicts might involve terrible decisions, or determining the right way to feel about a situation, or the interior human monologues through which we forever wind and contradict ourselves. To create characters that can shoulder this great task, we need to know them with great intimacy.

The Sticking Place

My norm in short stories is to develop a rough plan. I am a mostly-plotter these days, although pantsing has been making a surprising surge for me. I begin writing, spurred often by some initial image; the setting balloons around me. The characters begin to vibrate. I carry through a scene, and my pounding fingers start to slow. A drizzle, a trickle, then a mist.

In this moment, my mind is not blank. In fact, it teems with some kinds of self-annihilating pairs of thoughts: Christina will– but no, she won’t. Then I’ll have her– but no, she can’t. Christina should– but if she does how will I write about that? The ideas all stop before they can begin. I realize, I know far less about Christina than I had thought. My plan feels feeble. I might muddle on for another day or two, write an arduous paragraph that feels all wrong–here is when I need to stop.

Developing Characters in a Planning Document

Behind every story I’ve written in the last year and a half is a massive shadow. The planning document stretches far beyond the story itself. I freewrite my frustrations there, my wandering brain, and every half-formed possibility I am considering. I find a planning document like this indispensable because it allows me to record ideas with the comfort that they are not in the story (yet!) itself. It is a freeing thing, to leave the actual draft behind and be able to spill without compunction. The doubts feel much quieter. Or I can just write them straight down on the page themselves, and they become less powerful.

In this document, I begin a character freewrite. I start riffing on the few details that I know, and I rapidly proliferate them into a life story. I play at psychoanalysis. Motivations become concrete. The dark swaths of the unknown I first identify (Does she have family?), then color in (Who are they?).

When I taught high school creative writing, I used to give students a “character profile” worksheet to complete for their short stories, inherited from a previous teacher. The kids found it dubiously useful. I too don’t find it particularly sharp, although the second page has some interesting starter-prompts.

The character profiles I write today end up more like long-winded anecdotes. I don’t edit. I just go. Another question pops into my mind, and I switch to writing about that. I make up as I go, but sometimes I need to stop for research (How much money does a camera operator make? What are the most popular soccer teams in southern Italy?). I babble, add more, and I find myself using this odd tone: “Let’s have Galeota be from a little ways outside the city,” I write. It’s that “Let’s have–” I am half unearthing them and half constructing.

For me, what’s different about this kind of character profiling than the straight pantsing in the story document is the lack of self-censoring. I am fully aware that 90% of the details in the planning document (and fully 100% of the words themselves) will never make it into the story. They will be instead the girders upon which I perch in order to write the final text. They are behind the scenes, and so the stakes are low. The self-criticism largely vanishes.

Something humbling: sometimes when I do this, I realize that the character as I had imagined them before has elements of caricature and of stereotype. I realize that I have drawn less on deep thought than on smack judgements. In the deeper profiling, I must work to push myself past, to look at each character with the open eyes of one who really seeks to know who they are in every facet. This is a good lesson for outside of writing too, for how we see others whose full stories we do not know.

Bringing it Back to the Story

In my experience, two or three hours freewriting on a story’s characters revolutionizes them when I return to the story document. The characters have a new life to them, because I know more clearly their direction. I’m more sure of their reactions, and so they function as themselves more confidently. From these new supports, more aspects of the story get fleshed out. They proliferate like foliage.

The story often inflates in length and complexity. Sometimes it gets too long. I would rather have too much material than too little. Often, the character brainstorming has also shifted my plot. The story evolves. New possibilities open. What I’d thought before was boring actually is rich. It’s invariably helpful. In those moments, I often wonder why I didn’t do the character-freewriting before.

How do you approach character in writing? What tools do you use to get to that place of complexity and independence? How do characters impact your stories? Please share.

Thanks for stopping by. Stay well, keep writing, think of others, and of yourself. Best wishes for the week ahead,
Jimmy