How do we get readers to engage with our stories? It’s a perpetual question in writing, because the plain truth is this: every minute a reader spends on your story is purest charity. He could abandon it after the first word; he could skim a few scenes; he could read the last few pages and walk away. Thankfully, we have a number of tools for this purpose, and today we’re assessing one of them. What precisely makes a character feel human to the reader? What gets him to connect on a more than intellectual level?

One dictum modernity has delivered on character writing is that characters must have flaws. Flaws, the conventional wisdom assures us, are what make them human; flaws are what makes characters something the reader cares for. Of course, going overboard with the flaws has its problems. Most people aren’t interested in a story that wants you to enter into the viewpoint of a rapist¹. Pile too many flaws onto a character, make him a cowardly, lustful, envious, sadistic, psychopathic, short-tempered, vengeful, selfish serial rapist, and 99.9% of people will just walk away. They don’t want to read about somebody who may seem human (for humans can be monsters) but whose every movement has the moral character of the Marquis de Sade or Lavrentiy Beria.

On the other hand, simply leaving the flaws out seems just as fatal. ‘Mary Sues’ are common, but they are despised for a reason.² Making a character flawless makes them feel like cardboard cut-outs, inhuman and impossible to empathize. At best (worst), they can be objects of worship or envy, even means of self-adulation via projection. So making the character all flaws might repel people, but making the character flawless results in it becoming impossible to perceive as truly human.

The hypothesis that flaws are what make characters human, then, seems assured, even if we need to be careful about going overboard. People would rather read about a serial rapist like Genghis Khan³ than about Miss Goody Two-Shoes. In all honesty, I had accepted it for quite a while, at least implicitly. As I recently realized, though, the theory has some metaphysical implications. If flaws make characters human, that implies flaws are the essential characteristics of man. This is not a Biblically tenable position for two reasons. First, man was made perfect in the image of God. If vice (flaws) were integral to him, that implies vice would be integral to God, a statement not only heretical but nonsensical (as God’s character is the source of the virtue-vice distinction, vice being that which is contrary to His character). Second, if flaws were integral to humanity, Christ could not be human without having flaws or be flawless without falling short of humanity. As both His humanity and His sinfulness are, quite aside from their Biblically assured status, essential to His work of salvation (Heb. 4:14-16), we must discard the hypothesis.

If flaws are not integral to humanity, it can’t be flaws that make characters human. After all, while we are all integrally flawed after the Fall, barring His saving grace, our humanity is harmed and reduced by those flaws, not magnified or established. Flaws are the cracks in the wall, not the wall itself, and so any depiction of the wall (which plays the role of the character in this analogy) is recognized as a wall not because of its cracks (flaws) but because of the edifice those cracks exist within. With the flaw-relatability theory set aside, I present my assertion as to what makes characters feel human.

What makes a character into a human, and consequently into something to be cared for, is that character’s virtues.

The first objection here is obviously the problem of the Mary Sue. The Mary Sue, after all, seems built of nothing but virtue, and yet something less human seems hard to grasp. Even people who like Mary Sues seem to do so not because they empathize with the characters as they would with another but because they project their desires onto them. This problem has a two-part solution.

First, we must consider what types of virtues Mary Sues generally exhibit. Generally speaking, Mary Sues have three types of virtues: easy if genuine, superficial, and enforced. Enforced virtues, to start at the end, are virtues the narrative asserts they have which no sane person would attribute to them if they were real. Obviously, these can be discarded from our assessment; they are flaws more than virtues, and the reader hates them because they’re lies, not because they’re virtues. Superficial virtues include beauty, superpowers, charisma, and the like. These are virtues in the sense of being beneficial, but on a moral level they are at best featherweights. Once again, these are irrelevant. The last type of virtue are those which are ‘easy but genuine’, and these actually matter. A Mary Sue can be kind, gentle, and merciful in real truth while still being utterly unsympathetic, feeling like a virtue-doll or an illusion rather than a human-except-fictional. The answer to how these virtues fail to make the Mary Sue ‘human’ comes in understanding the second half of the answer.

Second, we must refine what we mean by ‘virtue’ and give it context. Easy virtues aren’t worth much. A man who is polite to those who are polite to him does not deserve excessive accolades; the child that proves himself truly diligent in finishing his chocolate cake off merits little congratulation. Being kind and merciful when it costs nothing doesn’t really impress us much. Therefore, in characters, easy virtue means very little. The man who shows mercy to his neighbor’s bunny rabbit when it nips his finger is doing the bare minimum, after all. Easy virtues are anodyne, and therefore easy virtues are boring.

The fix to this is simple: make it hard for the character to be virtuous. When a soldier sacrifices his life to hold off the foe and preserve his comrades’ lives, he is lauded and that justly. Why? Because he performed an act of virtue, and because he did so despite the immense cost. That hardship makes virtue real, though, is only the first effect of this change.

How do we connect to others? On a basic level, we recognize in them something of what we ourselves experience, and we empathize with it (or sympathize, for those parts more removed from personal experience). Sometimes, unfortunately, this short-circuits our rational faculties, but for now that’s an upside, speaking as it does to the overwhelming force of the instinct. This same process applies to characters. We see them living a human life⁴, even if that life is projected into our thoughts by the page rather than by seeing it happen in primary reality.⁵ Having perceived this, we then understand them in terms of our own experiences, including those experiences which were themselves vicarious (stories, primarily), shaped as well by worldview and the particular circumstances of our existence. This applies even at the merest glance; the attribution of humanity to anything, even a non-person, is the first run-through of this process, which continues to run so long as the perceived human is in our thoughts. We see a person, we recognize them as a person, and we extend to them a level of care proportional to our intimacy and relationship (though what that proportion is depends very much on your individual proclivities).

Easy virtues are barely relatable⁶ to us. We all have them, of course, if only because of social conditioning, practicality, and the blessing of a conscience. We don’t kick kittens, we smile at babies, and we like people who like us, if they’re not too annoying. We have them, but they aren’t a focus point of our existence. Easy virtues, even more than easy vices (which tend to be much more absorbing, if they are not of unconscious omission), are background noise. We filter the easy virtues out of our thoughts because they aren’t really relevant to what we do. They’re easy, so they don’t make an impression, so we don’t remember them, and so they don’t create empathy when seen.⁷

Hard virtue… Well, we all have experience with hard virtue, either in success or failure. Every one of us has tried to do something right and failed to retain our resolve long enough; every one of us has managed with gritted teeth (metaphorical or not) to do something we know we ought to do, however much it hurts. It might have been against physical danger; it might have been against emotional danger (apologizing hurts sometimes); it might have been against social danger⁸ (will he still be a friend after I do what I must?). Often, it is moral danger, the realization that you have to do the right thing because God commands it, however much you hate the necessity, that failing here would be a grave sin.

We all know what hard virtue is from personal experience, and therefore when we see it in characters, we admire it. Was their virtue successful against all odds? We admire them, see in them aspirations which live in reality and not in a Mary Sue’s fantasy world. Did they submit in the end, falter in virtue before the great trials? We mourn, and we understand, for we have done the same. The first is a comedy; the second is a tragedy. In both cases, we learn to see these characters as people by watching them wage moral war. We ask if they will falter, if the vice they have within themselves and the trials which aid it will overcome their moral fiber. If they fail, they fail in our eyes (assuming the author’s skill) as humans failing, not as mere ciphers on the page; if they triumph, they triumph too as men.

God bless.

Footnotes

1 – This is a generalization. On the counterpoint, serial killer shows (and serial killers have a tendency towards rape and necrophilia) might give this some lie. It’s a matter of perspective and expectations; I warrant that serial killer shows don’t generally ask their watchers to enter into the perspective of a rapist as he rapes.

2 – Read that article on Mary Sues here!

3 – You have a decent chance of being descended from Genghis Khan, actually. Testing of male Y chromosomes has shown that about one in two-hundred has a certain male ancestor in their lineage; given history, Genghis Khan is the most likely candidate for that ancestor.

4 – Technically speaking, we don’t engage with real people any more directly than with fictional ones; we understand both through models we create in our head based off of preconceptions, worldview, and sensory perceptions. It’s just that real people have an existence of a different nature than fictional ones, more real, more independent, much more mysterious to even themselves.

5 – I wrote an article on primary vs secondary creation here, though it’s also important to last week’s article and to this paper on miracles in fiction. Ultimately, I’m pulling the term from Tolkien’s On Fairy Stories, available here.

6 – That this is the only use of this word in the article quite surprised me on finishing it.

7 – The lack of an easy virtue is easily visible though. Why? Generally speaking, even if the easy virtue is also easily evaded or reversed, the failure to run along standard human tracks attracts attention because it’s abnormal. We focus very readily on abnormalities.

8 – Yes, social danger is a form of emotional danger in many situations. In story terms, though, it is different enough to be separated.