A distinctive, compelling character is a central part of most good stories, and therefore it’s a difficult goal to achieve for us writers. As a result, we as authors spend a lot of time worrying about how to make our characters work. We collate flaws, virtues, and backstory; we analyze and outline; we hope desperately that our main character is at once focused enough to be coherent and expansive enough to be ‘realistic’ (or ‘round’ or ‘interesting’). We look back at the last 80000 words of our latest novel draft and wonder if the characters don’t seem a bit bland, a bit distracted, a bit unfocused and fuzzy. What keeps this character as himself rather than a messy blur of two inconsistent characters or merely a gray mass?

I don’t have The Solution to this. I don’t even have a ‘possible and complete solution’. What I do have, and what I think you will find useful, is the kernel of a solution. This solution isn’t universal, and it isn’t comprehensive. I do believe, however, that it works, at least when applied with care and forethought. Give the character a central concept around which to organize their arc, their goals, and their relationships. This concept provides a point of commonality between each aspect of their character, even if it’s never stated (as it usually shouldn’t be). It also provides a heart to the character’s plot-goal, the concrete desire (vengeance, money, that piece of jewelry, his family’s safety, etc.) which drives his plot participation.

Let me use an example to explain this. Imagine a character whose central concept is a desire for safety. He lives in a dangerous land, one with borders fortified inside and out by sci-fi technology, and amidst people who are either oblivious to their dystopia or complicit in it, often without malice. He desires safety, and therefore he seeks to leave his land, to go to the lands beyond where safety is more attainable. This is his plot-goal, the idea around which the story is built. In order to facilitate leaving, he, being a man of some forethought and great determination, trains to prepare himself for the task, learning to use his body, building up his knowledge and resources to use the technology effectively. Furthermore, he deliberately chooses to avoid emotionally connecting with people; those connections are a danger to his safety, after all, contrary to his central concept’s plot manifestation.

This man is, however, not quite successful in evading relationships altogether. He has his mother, whom he loves. He has a neighbor’s child, whom he rescued and mentored. He has his almost-father, the man who provided him refuge and furthered his quest to ready himself for escape. These connections are not congruent with his desire to escape his homeland; if service to that desire was his ultimate, he would have only physical and mercantile dealings with them. The emotional connection is a problem for escape. But escape isn’t his central idea; safety is. He wants safety, and each of those relationships provides some form of safety. His mother loves him without willingness to ever cease, with assurance that he will not walk the path of ends-justify-means all the way to its end; the kid he’s mentoring respects him, perhaps does not fully know him but would do much to keep from hurting him; his mentor may not approve of all he does but will never betray him, is a rock of council as he prepares, a physical refuge when he meets trouble too great for his own efforts. They are emotional and spiritual safety, even as he struggles ever towards physical safety.

Hopefully this example makes it clear what I’m talking about. The problem with explaining it, honestly, is that I don’t create characters by starting with a central concept. The central concept is, quite honestly, too vague. I can create a thousand characters from a single concept, and none of them would be the same, though an astute reader would all notice a thematic similarity. No, I create a character, gives him flaws and virtues, gives him a set of goals, and then I step back, look at all the writing I’ve done, tens of thousands of words (in the most recent cases, two main characters whom I’ve written about 200K words for, not counting outlining and notes), analyze what I’ve created, and pull it together into something more coherent. I look at the character’s flaws, at his virtues, at what he wants, and I find the unifying thread that pulls his character arc together with his plot goal together with his thematic role, pruning the parts of this story that, on greater reflection, are a detriment rather than an aid.

This core desire gives the character focus and coherence. The reader sees that he wants to escape his homeland, and he understands the desire for safety; he sees his unwittingly grown attachment to those around him, and he recognizes that with these people at least he has surety. In all this, unless I’m being particularly clumsy, I haven’t said, “The connective tissue between these two apparently contradictory ideas, the reason they feel right together, is a desire on the protagonist’s part for safety.” That would be crude and, worse, ineffective. No. The reader may not have ever noticed the connection, not consciously. He knows that these fit together, though, that they rhyme. If he’s interested, he might go and analyze the story, figure out how the mechanisms work, but just as we don’t need to consciously check our syllables and vowels to know we’ve heard a rhyme, a well-made story does not need to be dissected to be unified in the reader’s mind.

The plot-goal of the character must descend from that character’s core desire, at least in the reader’s eyes (from your perspective, the plot-goal will often come first, just as Agatha Christie used to find her story’s ending and then re-write them to produce it). The central plot-goal of the character, their primary desire which drives their participation in the plot, is what unifies the story, gives each part relevance, and thereby motivates the reader to move from point A to point B. Inside the story, it’s what pushes the character through the hardship, what allows them to show their virtue through trial, what brings out their vice under pressure.¹ If the central desire of the character is not linked to the rest of their character, they split into two halves, the plot half of the character and the character half (splitting the main plot from the character arc, which is a type of sub-plot).² This is precisely the danger I’ve been facing in my own current draft and part of the reason I’ve set out to formulate my solution. The character’s role in the plot must flow organically from the rest of their character and vice versa; trying to stitch these two together with the assurance that they’re the same person will not fix the problem if they are not in fact the same person.

This idea of a ‘central character concept’ or ‘core desire’ does lead to a question: can the central concept of a character change? The simple answer is ‘no’. Changing the concept makes the character lose his unity, fractures him. The long answer is ‘yes, but with a lot of caveats and trouble’. First, you might actually want to creature a fractured character. In this case, you better be real good at writing, but it can work. Second, you can use character development to change a core desire. However, because of how deep this element of the character is, the development must be exceptionally well-written, with depth and breadth in the narrative, not an unprecedented snap decision, not at all easy. Humans don’t change their fundamental desires easily; therefore, if you want a character to change their core desire, the longing that they probably don’t realize but which you’ve made to underlie their action and thought for the entire past of the story, you’ll have to work for it (or the readers will notice and scoff).³ Third and finally, the restrictions story places on you to retain the same core character desire is looser when transitioning from story to story; in other words, while one story may be held together by one core desire, another may supplant it for the new story. The first desire, however, must not be entirely abandoned; the second must not be invented for purpose. To this end, the change will likely be best accomplished by a mutation of the first desire into the second rather than by a brute-force replacement, with care taken to preserve the identity of the character, to preserve continuity of character between the narratives.

Remember that the character may not need to change their core desire to remain useful to the story, to remain interesting even through multiple sequels. Their core desire should be general, broad, not limited to a single moment. That’s why it can cover their arc, their flaws, their struggles, their goals, all at once. The new path of their story may be a continuation of that desire’s effect within them, how it interacts with new circumstances and trials, with new characters around them, with the results of the changes it has already prompted. Nevertheless, sometimes the core desire needs changing. The old concept must remain, though. It may be set aside as less than primary, but if it was primary, it is still important. The character’s new core desire, his new perspective, may clash with it, reinforce it, surpass it, but it may not simply ignore it. Down that path lies making your character ‘in name only’, unrecognizable except by name and other superficialities. That will break your story.⁴

So is this all realistic? Again, yes and no. It’s a simplified understanding of how people work, but that’s precisely what characters always are. People really do have central desires that dictate everything they do. These desires are their gods, whether self or family or Allah or Christ. These desires are generally more complex than the core character desires I’ve been talking about, though, and are overlaid by a whole medley of other, incredibly strong desires (created by circumstance, religion, family, history, and temperament). It’s this second layer where we would take many of our character’s core desires from, if they were real people; in such cases, we’re not taking their real core desire but rather a secondary desire that, under their primary, more general desire, rules the period of their life that the story compasses. When we read such stories, we’re seeing a snapshot of a person all zoomed in, with the illusion of them having more beyond the edges of the narrative, and that’s how stories work. Of course, sometimes the core desire the story uses is actually the character’s deepest desire, deepest value, the thing they hold the highest.

In the end, we must remember that this passage is a solution but not a complete one. This way of understanding your character will not replace hours upon hours upon hours of sitting down and writing, sweating bullets as you force the character to come to life. Hopefully it’ll make it easier, quicker, smoother; hopefully the end product will be better. Knowing a character’s core character desire gives you a handle on their entirety, a pillar of solidity around which to build the superstructure of their life, to unify the plot they live through. The fun part, the painful part, is that we still have to build that superstructure, still have to put that plot in order (sometimes multiple times).

God bless.

Footnotes

1 – Read an article about why this is important here.

2 – “As we have seen, effective plots are unified- they have a single, not a double… [conflict].” Michael Tierno, Aristotle’s Poetics for Screenwriters. A worthwhile read, if only situationally correct (like essentially all writing advice).

3 – One type of character development invariably will result in such a massive re-ordering of priorities and desires: repentance and belief in Christ and His Work (or, if your story is set before His death and resurrection as my current story is, belief in God’s promise of redemption). Such a change will place ‘honoring God’ or a similar idea at the core of the person’s desires, though as I’ll discuss, this doesn’t mean it will reign at every time, particularly at first.

4 – Can you have multiple? I think it’s possible, but exponentially harder and likely to be underpinned by a uniting theme.