People are incredibly, ridiculously complex. Our characters? Not so much, not in comparison. The most complex character has perhaps a few years of cumulative thought-history in his author’s mind; he’s made out of generalizations and half-rejected ideas and a unique blend of by-the-pants instinct with meticulous notes. Any adult, meanwhile, has an order of magnitude more thought-history, several orders of magnitude more reciprocal interaction with humanity, and a soul, something we humans cannot give our characters. Yet still our characters can surprise us, their writers.

Before we go on, I must provide context. Every writer has a different experience with their characters because, at the very least, every writer has a slightly different method. Most generally, the relevant distinction here is between ‘pantsers’ and ‘plotters.’ Pantsers, the line goes, start with a bunch of ideas and a situation, then run from there; plotters sit down and write out what is going to happen, who each character is, before they set pen to paper (or fingers to keyboard). If neither one quite fits, that’s because this is a continuum, not a binary.

Where each author sits on the continuum is different. I write an outline before I write the story, but that outline is very often just a ‘wouldn’t it work if X happened’ list or a ‘and then, probably, and then, probably’. In the first draft, this outline is going to be scrapped multiple times, bits and pieces cannibalized for the next iteration. If I had to describe it, I’d call it the calculus method. I start with an estimate of where I’m going, move forward a bit, and recalibrate towards where I’m actually going. Repeat over and over till the story finishes that draft, then repeat again in the next draft. In this way I create oodles of outlines, but none are dictators. All are subject to my pantser whims, if those whims seem better than the outline, all in search of that final limit- which is the final product, the best version I can make.

With that out of the way, let’s get to the first of my three (vaguely outlined) points: characters will surprise us, at least those of us who aren’t full plotters. It’s an inevitable part of any sufficiently complex emergent process. Writing a story, particularly a lengthy one, means juggling hundreds of small bits of information around- worldbuilding, character, timeline, and more. For the side characters, their relative simplicity makes them easier to anticipate. If they do something surprising, it’s generally (not always) on the prompting of another, more complex character.

When it comes to our more complex characters, though, the surprises start happening. A complex fictional character is an assembly of many different bits of backstory, character (look, I don’t have a better word), worldview, prejudice, affection, and habit. He interacts, moreover, with a world that with every bit of writing you do gets just a little more complicated, with more and more little details. It’s easy to write and write and write, then realize suddenly that the character simply would never do what you anticipated them doing. He’s foolish, you realize, but not in precisely that way, angry, but not actually at that person, careful and considerate, but in a way which makes that plot line flop.

Character interactions in particular can run this way. One character bounces off the other, and then you realize that this line of dialogue pushes a very specific button that kinda has to be there for all sorts of reasons. It’s what Character A has to say, to be true to the person you’ve built, but it sends Character B off on a tangent you didn’t expect. He spends a page arguing about an issue you had barely considered, he makes a reveal of something you didn’t expect to be communicated for at least three chapters, or he refuses entirely to discuss the plot-moving information you provided him with (he might also refuse to hide that information).

In such cases, of course, we have the option of backtracking, finding an alternate path for Character A just to keep Character B within the story. Quite possibly, such evasion of the difficulty is the right choice. The surprise then becomes something you know about the character, lying behind the scenes you choose to keep for the next round of revision (or to actually publish), but which the reader can only guess at in a ‘what if’ sort of way. The impetus of the narrative, the story you want to tell, the promises you made in the earlier chapters, the constraints of a fitting ending, all these and more can justify such a choice. It may not be an easy maneuver, but very often merely changing a small detail in one place is enough. Very often, a character can say, realize, remember, encounter, or notice many equally plausible but significantly different things, allowing you to steer the narrative without breaking its secondary reality.¹

Very often, however, this diversion, even if it’s small, a page long or two, is actually a benefit to the story. It adds verisimilitude; it open new vistas of possibility. It declares a path just slightly better than the one you’d seen before. This path may require more work, of course. It may require a blended approach, ameliorating the diversion while also using it, or it may mean leaning into the change from plan. Always be careful that you don’t follow whim to the detriment of art; pursue the wild goose chase if it promises much, but always rest your final decision on careful consideration.

Sometimes, though, the paths we find our characters on aren’t quite so pleasant. Sometimes, in fact, characters we like, both writing and reading, do nasty things. They speak in spite, they try to hurt others, they turn their back on duty, or they break a relationship in an incredibly painful way for everybody with deliberate malice. This can be bad writing, of course; don’t think I’m saying that ‘edgy equals good.’ Pushing characters into doing nasty stuff via authorial fiat is a very bad idea, a good way to lose you readers like flies in an oven.

The opposite, though, is a temptation. When my protagonist starts to move towards doing something truly nasty- petty things, like choosing words designed to hurt his companion (the secondary protagonist)- I have an impulse, slowly being snuffed out, to avoid that. The character is a good guy, the idea runs, I don’t want to watch him make a fool of himself, don’t want to watch him sin in such a repulsive way. In my older writing, this impulse probably has more reign than I’d like to know; I’m fairly certain I sought to keep certain characters untarnished, to put them in situations they came out of looking good, to polish them up. I wasn’t quite set on it, but there was that instinctual dislike of smearing grime into the good guy.

In such circumstances, though, we have two workable choices only: either our character does the nasty thing or we change circumstances- including the character, possibly- so that he doesn’t. Again, sometimes the change may be the right choice. However, at the end of the day, in real life people do nasty things. They try to hurt each other; they’re petty; they’re malicious, even when they are very far from being hostile on ‘big problems’ like life-and-death. When problems do get big, do get life and death, sometimes people make terrible choices. We must not lie about this; we must not whitewash humanity.

A story which will not let its main character be tarnished is a lying story; it’s bad art. We must stifle and crush the impulse to protect our favorite characters from their own mistakes. Otherwise, the reader will slowly realize that the story is cotton-swathed and straight-jacketed, that the characters aren’t truly being challenged. The possibility of hurt is an immense part of the effect of victory; the reader can know all day that the author has declared that the story has a happy ending, but it won’t spoil the story half as much as knowing that the main character will never actually be challenged to breaking. If you do challenge them to breaking even after so protecting them, it will come off more forced, less realistic, more the work of authorial fiat than organic development.²

The last point on my outline (all five lines of it) points me towards the next topic: the not-surprises that organic character writing can produce. See, when I write a conversation or a monologue, I know even when I start that it has the potential to go off course. As noted above, that’s normal. Items on the list-to-do get missed, and other topics pop up out of nowhere. Sometimes, though, I stumble into a particular type of almost-surprising development.

In writing, we have sometimes a very particular dilemma. Shall we choose the easy (but still believable) progression of events, the order that’s already in our outline? That’s one option, easily understood, but the other side’s more complex. Characters and worlds interact in complex ways, ways that even exhaustive planning won’t truly anticipate. So, as I write, I often come across a new angle, a new interaction. I realize that this character will have this opinion on that topic, and I realize further that while the conversation I’m writing could quite plausibly steer along the shallow waters I planned, the deeper waters I’ve encountered are accessible through it.

Imagine, if you will, two characters discussing their respective backstories. The reader already knows most of this, so you’re not being too heavy on details; the focus is not on the telling but on the effect of the telling on each party. The older character gets to a particular part of her story; she’s discussing her time in an area that was undergoing significant societal and economic upheaval. The younger character could, at this point, nod along, could react to the story by analyzing the military engagements that are happening in the foreground or by relating to the emotional turmoil. The reader would believe it, you know, but you also know the younger character’s backstory, how he spent a small but significant period as a leader for a settlement that was suddenly isolated due to the same battle that devastated its infrastructure and good stores. So you make a choice, and, at least in this example, you choose the deep waters. The younger character interrupts the older and asks about logistics, asks how the background societal change worked. The discussion flows from there, and as you go, you unveil to the reader- and maybe a little to yourself- the underlying concern of the question: can people actually do better, or will they react in the same broken way they did when I tried to help?

As you can see, this sort of curve in the story’s stream is hard to see coming for the reader, hard too for the author. It could be planned, but for me at least such thoughts emerge out of doing the footwork of writing the moment-to-moment happening, of realizing that this location and that thought late on the character’s previous night will combine to something you didn’t see coming, something stronger than you had hoped. No, this won’t always work out, but when it does? One of the indications of quality, to me, is a story which can pull this off well, which makes me as a reader feel at once the renewed interest of a new turn in the story and the realization that I’m seeing a little deeper into the character than I expected.

Writing is often rather like riding a horse that wants to be a dolphin and believes a dolphin to be a sort of bird. Things go along all nicely for a few paragraphs, the descriptions line up beautifully, and then you either run into a stone wall full speed, losing all capacity to write anything but nonsense, or the story jumps backwards and sideways, doing three somersaults before landing on its new course. Forgive the hyperbole, but writing, particularly for the more pantser-types among us, is a wild task. We must learn, therefore, to both ride the beast and tame it, to figure out where it goes and then weigh the fruit of each choice, picking the one that best suits our purpose: true beauty to God’s glory.

God bless.

Footnotes

1 – Behold, an article on secondary reality/ secondary creation.

2 – Be careful also with bad guys. Don’t just pile on evil after evil without a reason and a coherence; that makes a caricature rather than a character. Many great villains have some virtue to them; many have some element which in a better man would make them a hero. Be careful not to erase the good in a villain merely because he is a villain, or add good merely for the sake of it. As always, write with intention.