How to create complex characters
What’s more important, plot or character?
I always wonder why readers, reviewers, agents, editors, publishers, and (worse, yet!) writers make distinctions between plot driven stories and character driven stories.
I mostly wonder about this because I refuse to believe there’s any such distinction.
In fact, I think the distinction between plot driven and character driven stories is a set-up by the Big 5 Publishing companies to disrupt—what should be—the camaraderie among writers. And why would our corporate overlords ever do such a thing to us, their faithful lackeys?
Money, of course.
Calling a novel plot driven or character driven is just a marketing category with little or nothing to do with the actual craft of making stories. After all, please name a plot (literally, just one) that isn’t the result of a character’s (or personified forces) choices, actions or reactions. I’ll wait…
Or to put it another way, what character isn’t involved in the plot of the novel in which they—majorly or minorly—star? How could any plot be separated from a character? How could any character be separated from a plot?
We’re in a chicken or the egg situation here, people.
Robert McKee, that old titan of story, has an even more hardcore take on this issue: “what looks like an aesthetic debate masks the cultural politics of taste, class, and worst of all money…character driven is code for ‘a superior work of art, made not for profit but love, best interpreted by academic critics, appreciated by an intellectual elite, and ideally financed by public funds,’ versus plot driven as a code for the opposite: ‘a trivial work, written by hacks, laced with cliches, aimed at the undereducated, too trite to be of critical interests, and made for corporate profit.”
Hardcore, indeed.
The idea that either character or plot could individually be more important than the other is preposterous. They’re so intertwined that in a craft sense, and maybe a metaphysical one, character and plot might actually be the same thing. That’s why I believe a lot of writing advice and craft talk centered on constructing plots, refining plots, and perfecting plots is actually focused on the wrong thing.
We should be working on developing complex characters so that the plot—defined as what happens when characters are put under pressure—unfolds on its own.
What makes a character complex?
In his fantastic work of literary criticism, How Fiction Works, James Wood writes “I think novels tend to fail not when the characters are not vivid or deep enough, but when the novel in question has failed…to manage a specific hunger for its own characters.”
Whoa.
Characters that elicit a “specific hunger” from readers—to keep reading, linger on the page, imagine alternate happenings—go way beyond how characterization is conventionally taught because conventional characterization is taught incorrectly. I’ll save you the diatribe, as I’ve already written on this issue.
If we assume that character and plot are fully bound together then characterization goes much beyond how our character looks. Or what they wear, eat, drink, watch, read. We can go really far and say that it’s beyond even what they dream about.
Yes, these things are important, yes, you need to work them out as you build your stories, and yes, what someone eats, drinks, wears all factor into the person they are or are trying to be, but they’re not the most important thing when it comes to building complex characters that drive plots.
If we want to create the hunger that Wood is talking of, the type of desire in the reader that not only compels them to finish the book but forces them to live with your characters long after they’re done reading then you need to think of characterization as all of a character’s social, personal, private, and hidden traits that determine their responses, actions, and reactions.
These traits will influence how a character dresses, where they live, what they enjoy doing—the components of conventional characterization—but more importantly they determine how they will act when under pressure. All of the many ways a character chooses to act under pressure determines their complexity. Complex characters are what we hunger for when we read.
How do we build a complex character?
While I remain partial to fiction, especially novel writing, we have to beg, borrow, and ultimately steal (craft, not plots!) from our fellow story-tellers wherever we find them.
David Trotter in his Screenwriter’s Bible has a concept he calls The 10 Elements of Character. 7 of them are really good to create complex characters, 3 of them are totally ridiculous (as Bruce Lee said “absorb what is useful, reject what is useless, add what is essentially your own”) so we’re going to ignore the three that don’t work for our purposes.
The 7 Elements of a complex character are:
1. Complex characters have a goal and opposition. Goals should be specific and measurable. They should not be easy to attain. Why should a character have a goal and opposition? Well, opposition creates conflict and conflict creates drama. Drama reveals a character’s true complexity in how they react. Characters grow and change when they have a goal that is opposed because the opposition forces characters to face their fears. Ask: what does my character want? What do they fear the most?
2. Complex characters have a sufficient motivation to reach their goal. This motivation must grow with the conflict—usually because it’s actively opposed—becoming stronger as the story progresses.
3. Complex characters have a backstory. As Oscar Wilde said, “every saint has a past, ever sinner has a future,” so it is for complex characters. Backstory can be a singular event, just before the beginning of the story, that defines them.
4. Complex characters have the will to act. Action reveals character because characters do what they do because of who they are. Drama is a character’s reaction to an event.
5. Complex characters have a point of view. This is not the Point of View in which your entire story is related, rather a complex character’s point of view has developed as a result of their past, usually the event in their backstory.
6. Complex characters have room to grow. The events of your story must destroy a complex character’s conception of themselves. Growth only occurs through adversity and opposition, through striving for some kind of goal. Growth is from conflict, making decisions, and taking actions.
7. Complex characters are believable. They have human emotions, human traits, human values, and human dimensions. Just like you. Just like me. Just like all of us.
This is a list you should sit down with and fill in—thoughtfully, completely—for every character in your novel. Yes, I said it. Homework. And lots of it.
This is the hard work of making fiction, my friends. Having a bomb proof, stress-tested set of completed traits for your characters will save you the only unrenewable resource: time.
Time at the keyboard, time laboring over repetitive drafts, time reading through the 10,000 rejections you’re going to get because you didn’t put in the time answering the questions that will go a long way to making readers hungry for your characters.
What do we do with complex characters?
Now that you’ve crafted complex, rich, and appetite inducing characters you only have to set them free and watch the story take off, right?
Sure. Sort of.
Thoroughly building out the complexity of your characters is a critical step to telling a story. We still have to design a set of events for them to respond, act, and react against.
But, hey, at least now you got an idea of how it might all turn out.
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