Writing advice is sometimes less helpful than it sounds.

Across my years as an active writer of fiction, particularly long-form fiction (novels- one published so far), I’ve dabbled in all sorts of writing advice, and I’ve come up with my own. A central challenge of writing stories, particularly for authors who aren’t into the Henty method, is understanding and developing consistent, complex characters. Cool character ideas are a dime a dozen; cool visuals are a matter of skill with prose. The problem is wrangling characters into having 1) potential for development 2) clear identities and 3) strong motivations, the type that push a story forward. This last is particularly important for me because while I plot out stories in general terms, the minutia and character interactions and parts of the plot are driven by what the characters require, meaning I need characters to want something, to have direction to them.

The promise of a consistent, effective way to understand characters, therefore, is a tempting prospect indeed. I’ve tried questionnaires (the document folder for various drafts of Why Ought I to Die? is littered with the things). I’ve tried just pantsing it (with some success). I’ve written up half a hundred different notes and summaries of characters. Probably the greatest success I’ve had has been with a dialogue writing exercise wherein I interrogate the character, though I’ve really only done that once or twice (only once at length), excepting how that happens naturally in the story.

Now, many of these methods of understanding characters proved useful. One, indeed, I liked enough to write an article on it, though since then I’ve barely used it. Over the past week, I riffed on the classic want-need advice for character development to make a want-need-method assessment, which has helped with some characters and been less effective with others. The assessment joins a set of other summaries, half brainstorming and half decision, summaries of how characters relate to the theme, to the antagonists, and more (complicated by some summaries predating the fourth significant character’s significance).

The lesson I take from all this is this: trying to rely on a method is, ultimately, not a solution. The good ones are aids, and they become problems when used as more than that. For me, at least, the art of character writing requires me to get a near-instinctive grasp on the characters, to develop them as a set of ideas and desires and straight-up emotional responses rather than as a set of propositions. In other words, I need to know them as people. The various tools are methods to develop and expand this understanding, to find where new elements are implied or can be added. As a result, none of them is be-all and end-all. Some are useful in some places, some in others.

One part of character writing which is easily missed by all this, in my opinion, is the crucial aesthetic element of a character. If you’ve ever learned a character deeply, your own or somebody else’s, you’ve probably said at some point, ‘He wouldn’t do that,’ or ‘She would do this.’ The foundation for this assertion was not mere factual certainty; you might be able to adduce reasoning, if you went and dug, but the initial pronouncement was aesthetically based. You knew the character, and adding that action, that statement, that thought, that inaction to the character, it broke the character’s story. It didn’t match the aesthetics of the characters (and aesthetics, here, refers to the character’s beauty as a whole, not merely the visual elements).

This aesthetic element, note, is crucial also in plot and in worldbuilding (and is simultaneously a manifestation and an integral constituent of theme). Tolkien’s legendarium has an aesthetic coherence which makes even his incomplete stories, such as The Silmarillion, The Children of Hurin, The Fall of Gondolin, the Grey Annals, or The Fall of Arthur,¹ beautiful and impactful and absorbing. This aesthetic element is best described as the proper relationship of all parts (including the in-themselves ugly bits) to produce beauty towards Him.

It’s also, I think, the point at which character writing becomes truly effective and beautiful.

God bless.

Footnotes

1. The poem I read which first made me interested in poetry- and I read it after I read Beowulf. ↩︎