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Recently, while walking my dog, I chatted with a neighbor I don’t run across very often anymore, but a couple of years ago we worked closely together for quite some time as we dealt with an issue of contention in our neighborhood where we had common interests.
Back then we spent a lot of time with each other, and our relationship grew beyond just the problem we were working on. I brought her family food and groceries after she delivered a child. She asked me to take her son, along with another neighborhood kid, to a trampoline park when they needed an adult chaperone. She’s funny and hardworking and conscientious and kind, she can be hilariously snarky (extra funny coming from her angelically sweet face), and I like her quite a bit.
And not long ago, amid highly charged political events, she posted on her social media comments about how clear it is that everyone should choose her political party. Which differs from my own ideological bent.
Don’t worry, friends—this post is about writing and we won’t be touching the third rail of politics, except in this illustrative anecdote.
Our current social situation seems to have become so much deeper than, “I don’t agree with or like your beliefs.” Now there seems to be a complete dehumanization of anyone on “the other side.”
Admittedly that’s been happening for a while now, but it felt like only the most extreme voices taking that approach. Now, hearing a version of it from this woman I felt I’d formed a connection with, a friendship—someone I know to be, IRL, a relatable human being who loves her family and her community (and our shared neighborhood community), who can be deeply kind and generous and warm—has made me think about the weirdness of believing that everyone should believe and live as you do. The strangeness of wanting to paint all of humanity with a single brush. There is no such thing as homogeneity, and when there is, species become less resilient, stagnate, and can even die out, and whole ecosystems can weaken and collapse.
Yet that mindset seems to be at the root of a common pitfall I see in stories and characters that just don’t feel as if they’re coming to life: Often it’s because they feel unidimensional and flat, painted in broad strokes of black and white, rather than in the realistic shades of endless gray in which we live.
Creating Dimensional Characters
It’s tempting to think in terms of good or bad, clear-cut categorizations and blanket judgments; it’s tidy and orderly and offers us some sense of control and certainty in a world that offers little of either.
But in my teaching and speaking I frequently say that binaries exist in neither writing craft nor in story, just as they don’t in nature. Art is subjective and there are no absolute right answers or One True Path.
And when a story falls flat very often it’s because authors are painting in this limited and unnatural palette. That’s not reality, and it feels false and unnatural as we’re reading, which keeps readers at a distance. Characters don’t come to life, worlds and situations feel unbelievable because we know better: Life is gray; people are unpredictable and inconsistent and have the capacity to be staggeringly good and also shockingly bad.
That’s what it means to be human.
This isn’t a post about loving thy neighbor or accepting those who are different from you. (Though I’d argue that those are good tenets to live by.) It’s about seeing people, specifically your characters, as human—fully, contradictorily, messily, infinitely human.
I read a fair number of stories—both published and unpublished—with flat, unidimensional characters: abusive spouses, awful exes, bullying bosses, mean girls or boys. I see a lot of binaries and black-and-whites: all-knowing saintlike parents or neglectful, indifferent, or outright abusive ones. I see tidy happy endings with every challenge perfectly resolved and all the characters’ problems dissolving.
But that reduces human beings to tintypes who feel unrealistic and inhuman, both in fiction and in life. It makes your fiction lifeless and superficial and unsatisfying.
Yet the tricky challenge of fiction is that these recognizable realities of life have to be balanced with narrative expectations and conventions for story. Readers will tolerate gray area and untidiness—even thrive on it, as often it is what creates the most compelling and interesting characters and stories.
The tricky challenge of fiction is that these recognizable realities of life have to be balanced with narrative expectations and conventions for story.
But we also expect a certain amount of cohesion. In story as we do not in life, we have the power to make things tie together more intrinsically, to find meaning and resolution, to justify and understand why characters do what they do. Authors have to find that balance.
It’s challenging to create believably complex, ambivalent protagonists who contain both admirable traits and behaviors as well as less admirable ones. We know we have to keep our characters relatable and sympathetic enough that our readers will invest in them. How, the misapprehension seems to go, can we do that if they exhibit bad behavior or do bad things? How can our heroes be heroic if they are fearful or hesitant or uncertain? How can we root for them if they aren’t consistently admirable and fair-minded and good?
On the flip side, it’s tempting to make our antagonists uniformly villainous, hoping to raise stakes and reader engagement by sparking outrage or antipathy against our “bad guys.”
Read more: “Understanding Evil Characters (And Writing Them Real)”
And it can feel uncomfortable, even wrong, to create worlds and situations that are untidy and rough-edged, as is the real one. In story we crave answers, resolution, and absolutes. The good guys win it all, right? The bad guys fail and are punished. And the heroes live happily ever after.
But not only is that not realistic, with the truth falling anywhere on a spectrum between those poles, but so is the concept of good guys and bad guys. We are all potentially both, sometimes even at the same time. And there’s no such thing as happily ever after, because nothing in life is constant and the world can change on a dime.
Read more: “Working Backward to Create Fully Fleshed, Compelling Protagonists”
In life that can be uncomfortable, unpleasant, and hard to live with (as evidenced by the entire field of psychotherapy)—but in fact often that’s the emotional arc and meaning of story: that each of us is worthy even with our many flaws and shortcomings; that none of us is fully defined by our worst actions or moments; that redemption is possible. That life has meaning and beauty even amid its complicated, messy, often painful realities—in fact often because of those realities.
Complicate Your Characters
It’s so tempting to write characters who are the most, the best, infallible; or the least, the worst, evil. It’s so tempting to draw the lines between your characters, especially protagonists and antagonists, in thick black ink, with each on either side of the divide. After all, isn’t that what creates the tension and conflict that story thrives on? Isn’t that what amps up the stakes and gives readers something powerful to root for, and root against?
Read more: “Peopling Your Story (and Your World) with Individuals”
One thing I loved about the Avengers movies was that Thanos, the Big Baddy of the series, had understandable, even relatable goals: He worried about the future survival of life and the universe with overpopulation and was desperate to do something to fix it to allow life to carry on. He was willing to make unimaginable sacrifices, including his beloved favorite daughter, because he believed so powerfully in that greater good, as he saw it.
And I also loved the imperfect heroes, especially the incredibly flawed Iron Man: vain and hedonistic and full of hubris, struggling with being a team player because he was so used to being a star of the show, so certain he was right—yet trying to work with the other Avengers and do the right thing.
Writing characters from an artificially binary, black-and-white perspective is what makes them feel unrealistic, uninteresting, and flat in our stories.
We seem to have a binary mindset in our society: with team sports, political parties—even in the Bible we have good and evil. It’s common to slot people into neat categories: male or female, gay or straight, neurotypical or neurodiverse, rich or poor. We make broad generalizations about them: healthy or unhealthy, hardworking or lazy, nice or mean, liberal or conservative.
Politics and Hollywood and social media and advertising are all predicated on making us believe that people are one thing or the other. But that is not reality. And writing characters from that artificially binary, black-and-white perspective is what makes them feel unrealistic, uninteresting, and flat in our stories.
The reality is that people may be any of those things—and all of them. The truth is that we’re all medium people in a random, medium world, most of us trying to do our best most of the time, but that’s also a moving target: Who’s to say what is best? There’s no absolute definition of that, and even those of us who strive for it will fall somewhere on the spectrum between good and bad. And our “best” is so deeply influenced by our situation, circumstances, and psychological and emotional maturity.
Read more: “Most of Your Life Is Medium”
There are no binaries in nature. Everything is a spectrum. If you want to bring your stories to life and make them realistic, believable, vivid, rich and real, then work to bring that truth into your characters and stories.
In fact, bring it to your worldview and how you regard other people—because if you can’t see all the richness, nuance, and variety of human beings and of the world, you’ll never be able to create that kind of depth and verisimilitude on the page.
Lay it on me, authors! Do you struggle with creating dimension and contradictions in your characters that make them feel real, while still making them cohesive and relatable to readers? How do you approach characterizations: How do you flesh your characters out, explore their depths and nuances, put all that dimension fully and believably on the page? What are your biggest challenges in creating fully fleshed characters readers will invest in?
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26 Comments. Leave new
What a great subject for a post! Even better said that not only do we in IRL have to integrate the seeming contradictions in others as we do for our loved ones and within ourselves, but that in novels/movies, people may be looking for some relief: endings that give us rest and hope. Stellar read.
Oh, gosh, yes–respite and hope. So much of why I seem to read these days too. The way things could or should be…when the way they are can feel too bleak. Thanks for the comment, Laura.
Hello, Tiffany! I love what you’re saying to us here because, within it, I see my closest friends. I’ve had many discussions with them over 40+ years of friendship. And we’ve chosen to love each other for the whole of who we are. “Warts and all,” as somebody famously said. In writing my debut novel, I often look at the characteristics of my friends to enrich the characters of my pages. Again, “warts and all.”
We’re all warty, aren’t we? 🙂 To me that’s a big part of what our most important and closest relationships are–loving the whole person (even when sometimes we might not like that person, or their actions/behavior). I feel like when we give up on someone we deeply care about, all hope of growth or change is gone.
But I’ve been accused of idealism and overoptimism before. 🙂 Thanks for the comment.
Hi Tiffany,
In your own fiction writing, how do YOU:
• Flesh your characters out, explore their depths and nuances, put all that dimension fully and believably on the page?
• What are your biggest challenges in creating fully fleshed characters readers will invest in?
Best wishes and happy hols,
Val
Intriguing questions I want to think about more, Val–I’ll add to this comment when I have a little more time to give it the thought I’d like to later!
Is there a degree of fear in an author’s mind that to paint characters’ flaws is to expose one’s own darker sides and insecurities? (Asking for a friend:)
On the other hand, it does seem there are fewer and fewer “bad behaviors/acts” that people IRL can’t recover from these days…at least in the court of public opinion. (Not sure that’s a good thing, but there you have it.) What I’m hearing from you is that even though we need – more than ever these days – the “good guys” to win, no guy is ALL good.
So once again, Tiffany, you’ve got me thinking. Thank you for the timely insight…I look forward to carrying it with me in my next round of editing.
Oof, yes, I think so…don’t you? This stuff is hard to face in ourselves–and I often think the areas of greatest friction we have with loved ones arises from seeing traits we don’t like (or want to see) in ourselves reflected back at us. That’s the writer’s mandate (and challenge): to face the shadow side, lean into what human instinct might have us recoil from.
No guy is all “good,” and I am working hard to stay receptive and open to various points of view, not calcify in my own or be as willfully deaf or ignorant to hearing other opinions as it can often feel like many are right now. That is often easier said than done–I am as reactive as anyone else, as set in my own perspective, as guilty of black-and-white thinking. It’s a constant effort.
Glad the post provoked some thought–thanks for commenting.
IRL I truly value authenticity. I love the quirks and unique nature of people I meet. Knowing the why for what makes someone tick is an aspect most writers want to delve into—and all this creates a multi-dimensional character. But a book that recently opened my eyes further was Sociopath by Patric Gagne (I have no affiliation with this author).
We are all different. But some of us are different in a way that the majority of us do not understand and this memoir helped me understand another layer that our society has rejected and even vilified. It’s given me a broader scope as I create new characters.
Denise, authenticity has probably become one of the qualities I value above most others, the older I get–both in myself and in other people. And like you, people fascinate me–I ask a LOT of questions…more lately–trying to understand why people think as they do, do what they do. I just heard a great quote from Daryl Davis, the black man who has opened dialogue with KKK members, after which more than 200 of them have reconsidered their views and left the Klan. Interviewer Adam Grant asked him how he was able to keep hold of his own reactivity and emotions when talking to people who espouse such hateful views, many directed at him, and Davis said he gets “curious, not furious.” I love that so much. (The interview is wonderful, and it’s here, if you’re interested.)
Interesting memoir you mention. Sociopathic people are among those I am very wary of–I think because my understanding is that they lack that common frame of reference of the universal desires/emotions I think so many of us share, which I always feels offers basis for connection and understanding and empathy. Thanks for the comment!
I’m so glad you added this to your post, Tiffany. Like most conflict managers, I get pushback and disbelief from my workshop attendees and clients when I give tips for talking to those whose views disagree with theirs. There is so much to be gained by calling in rather than calling out. I ask them, “what do you fear hearing or learning if you ask them questions out of curiosity rather than debating, arguing, and trying to convince them they’re wrong to not think like you?” I tell my protagonist, “get uncomfortable, be challenged, ask good questions, and learn something new from the villain so I can write it down.”
I heard that concept not long ago, Deborah–calling in rather than calling out–and it also inspired me. Hard to do! But I think it’s the only thing that can create connections and understanding.
I love the question you ask–it holds up a mirror to what I think many of us feel: the resistance to hearing other perspectives if they don’t confirm our own, and perhaps our own unwillingness to be open to learning or broadening our views–and maybe our fear of being shown to be wrong in some way, as you suggest. Your line of work fascinates me. I read a lot of William Ury and other negotiators/diplomats, trying to understand conflict management better. I wish we taught that as a skill in school, along with other invaluable, desperately needed skills like civil discourse/debate, etiquette, etc.–these are the underpinnings of the fabric of society, unraveling by the day because we’re losing these social skills.
Love how you use your career skills in creating your characters too. 🙂 Thanks for sharing this!
Excellent post, both for creating real characters and dealing with real people. Everyone one is on a spectrum and that is what makes each person unique. We have to see the multi-dimensions in people before we can attempt to create multi-dimensional characters.
That’s my theory too! It’s funny how revealing writers’ stories are to me of their worldview, how they view others, and themselves. We are so present in our stories even when we think we aren’t.
This is so helpful, Tiffany. Thanks (now, just to do in my memoir what you discuss here…). In addition to making other people in my manuscript complex, I struggle to show myself as a complex and flawed and not always good person.
I think that’s probably pretty universal. I don’t know if any of us see ourselves clearly. So often we refract through a distorted lens that can make us think we’re better than we are–or worse than we are. I’ve concluded that one of the purposes of our lives may be to learn to see ourselves as clearly and realistically as possible–and accept that person, flaws and all. Thanks for the comment.
It seems to take a lifetime to develop self-understanding! I’m also fortunate that my basic needs for shelter, food, and safety (not to mention a good job and loving family support) are met so I have time to reflect on myself.
True–on both counts, I think.
Yikes, you’re scaring me. What’s happening in this country right now is not a question of politics, it’s a crisis of morality, and no, the other side of that is not just as valid, it’s downright evil. The “other side” has dehumanized themselves by defending the kidnapping of innocents and sending them to countries they have no affiliation with, and supporting a President with advanced dementia who has destroyed the Constitution and the White House with the same bulldozer. If only this were fiction and not reality, things would be going swimmingly.
Sorry this became a rant. I trust this could not possibly have been what you meant to say.
That said, thank you for reminding me that my antagonist will be much creepier if he is also charismatic. I’ve been struggling with that from the get-go, since he is based on a real-life person whom I cannot see that way because of, well, real life. But that is none of my readers’ business. They need to see him differently than I do.
I agree that this is far deeper than politics, and I’m as disheartened as you are by what feels like the decaying and outright abandonment of values I thought were fairly universal.
That said, I remind myself often that I don’t believe there is any way back from this that involves continuing to dehumanize others–on either side. People are complicated. I have a fair number of people in my immediate orbit–close family and dear friends–who are sanctioning things I find abhorrent. But I can’t dismiss them wholesale as people. I know them also to be capable of enormous love, generosity, kindness. None of us are all one thing. People are much more complex than that. Trying to understand what motivates their actions and beliefs feels essential to me to figure out some way to repair the damage done and being done to our society, world, democracy. (That said, I’m no saint and I don’t always succeed in maintaining this mindset.)
I mentioned in another comment an interview I recently listened to with Daryl Davis, a black man who engages KKK members in conversations–ones of curiosity and openness on his part, which often engenders unexpected openness and receptiveness on theirs, and in more than 200 cases has resulted in their reconsidering their views and leaving the Klan. Davis isn’t trying to convince or convert anyone. He’s listening, trying to understand, and showing them through his actions and behavior that he isn’t what they may have demonized him as. He opens minds through what he calls getting “curious, not furious.” This inspires me.
The other man in the interview, a former Klan leader who has been working with Davis–and now also a close friend–for many years, since being among the first who left the Klan after speaking with Davis, said of that initial meeting, “He showed me his humanity at that point. And when you dehumanize another human being, you lose your humanity in that process, and I had been chief dehumanizer for many, many, many years, so when Daryl showed me his humanity it cracked open this window, or cracked open this door, that hadn’t been cracked open in a really, really long time.”
If we dehumanize right back, we seal that door shut. I’d like to think–I need to think–that we might crack it open and let the light in.
Anyway…that’s my perspective, or the one I try to maintain. I know everyone is processing and handling our current situation differently, and no judgment. It’s a pretty shitty, challenging, dark time, and whatever gets you through the night, right? I think this is what I need to cling to to avoid despair.
In any case, I’m glad the post at least offered some ideas for your WIP! 🙂 Thanks, as always, for being here, Claudia, and your comments.
Thank you. This is a great reminder.
Thanks, Angela–glad it was timely for you.
You have captured the reality well, Tiffany. Reading this it struck me that in writing craft there’s always emphasis on who is keeping the protagonist from their goals, and that makes us tend to think villain. But equally we should ask who is helping them. And how much more interesting if it is the same person that does both. I believe I have a candidate character for that in my new wip. I’m off to explore this today. Thank you!
I love that idea, Ada–that an antagonist might also in part be the person pushing the character toward their goals, along their arc. That kind of gray-area complexity and layering is what can make stories especially rich and affecting. Thanks!
Thank you for your post today, Tiffany. This is without doubt my greatest challenge as a writer. I tend to address that challenge by looking at everyone I meet or observe as a potential book character, especially when I am in the midst of writing a story. Like the overweight young lady in the low-cut dress with spaghetti straps sitting at the bar alone hoping someone will talk to her. I can imagine so many stories surrounding her life.
But here is my question for you as a seasoned professional. As you point out in the opening of your piece today, we tend to perceive political views as black and white, even if that is not at all true. How do I keep from alienating half my readers by revealing inner thoughts that can be construed as politically charged, especially when those are the very characteristics that make characters more 3 dimensional? Sorry for my immaturity on this topic, but I am struggling to learn all I can from you.
Oh, the writer’s curse–or blessing, perhaps–that we are always observing, assessing, taking mental notes for our stories! 🙂
You ask a pertinent question, I think, for every writer, and I wrote a while ago about whether we choose to write “safe” or allow our perspective to find its way into our stories (in this post). I think each of us has to decide that for ourselves. My guideposts are that the “message” should never overtake the story itself, and that authors should avoid soapboxing or preaching because it can alienate readers (even ones who are sympathetic to our views) and make us feel talked-at or as if the author is pushing an agenda at us, rather than letting us lose ourselves in the story. These ideas usually don’t work well if overt, but rather a thread in the fabric of who the character is and why they do what they do and what they want and why it matters. It’s for the reader to infer any “message” from the story’s action and the character’s journey, rather than for the author to spoon-feed (or force-feed) it to us. I hope that addresses your question–it’s a good one, and thanks for offering it! Good food for thought.