Your Characters Should Talk to You, the Author

Characters Should be Living Beings

I have relatives and friends I haven't seen in many years, but I know they're real, live beings...well, some may no longer be alive but that's another consideration.

The characters who came into being in my various novels are just as real and alive as my relatives and friends...well, except for the ones I killed off in the stories.

When I am writing, my characters talk to me. They argue with me about certain scenes I'm trying to force them to act in.

"That's not me, Ron, you should know that. But if you insist on making me act that way in this scene, you'll see that it won't work."

The characters are always right. I may have spent weeks on a particular scene that I feel needs to be included in the story, but if it never seems to be right, feels flat, disingenuous, or contrived, then I know my characters are telling me something. Eventually, I delete the scene or change it substantially, so that the characters—and not me, the writer—are satisfied.

Your characters should be true to themselves. This means that if you create a character who is supposed to be one way to fit the conflicts in the story, you should never morph these characters into different personalities. Oh, sure, characters are supposed to grow and change, depending on their experiences in a story, but you shouldn't mess with the core being of that character. I know...you want an example.

How about a really bad example?

If you've ever watched daytime or nighttime soap operas for more than a year, you might notice that many of the characters change to fit what the writers want to be new roles for them. Erica was a conniving, selfish person for many years, and yet, when the writers needed her to be sweet and innocent and a kind of heroine on the show, she changed, almost overnight. On Dynasty a character named Steven (I believe) started out as a gay son, had several conflict scenes with his family, his father, and others over this, but when it was time for his role to change, he was no longer gay...in other words, don't look to soap operas for consistency of characterization. Unless you're writing a soap opera. I suspect that Mexican Novellas (their version of soap operas) are even more chaotic with their characters.

I haven't addressed the idea of surreal fiction and other forms of storytelling where we really don't expect realism in characterization. The characters can comprise any number of roles, without being realistic.

But in general, once a character has been born (created) and readers have a good idea what this character is like, understand a character's strengths and weaknesses, these should not be messed with. In a sense, I suppose you could say that characters should be predictable to a degree. I remember when I was creating the main character in one of my novels. I created him specifically for his role in the story. He was to be the kind of male who was comfortable with himself, looked inward for validation of his feelings, not outward. And as I got to know him through the various scenes in the story, and as I thought of him when I was at work or driving home from work, I would create scenarios and ask: what would Joel do? How would he react in this traffic jam? How would he have handled the conflict at the office today? On the other hand, in the same story, I created an opposite kind of character, who only looked to others for validation of his feelings, I made him question himself, attempt to get answers from outside himself. Then, in the unfolding of the story, I used these basic character traits and showed, over the course of the story, how each of them learned from the other. This is character "growth" at its most basic.

Now, back to scenes they refused to play as I had written them. I had to allow them their basic character traits, had to learn to let them be who they were in each of the scenes. In that sense, they spoke to me, and as a writer I learned to listen to my characters. Sometimes, I would attempt to give a character a name, but later on, a character's name came to me, even as I was writing them into the story. I sometimes get tickled at new writers who set out to write a story, and they name their characters what obviously sound like stage names, rather than depending on good old stand by names of real people. We just don't have to try that hard to "come up with" names. The characters can be Bill or Connie or Uncle Fred; they don't have to be Allred, Constance, or Uncle Alistair.