101 TIWIK #23: Why Are Characters So Darn Important?

There’s one thing that every story in recorded history has in common, and probably in unrecorded history as well: Stories are about people.

Even stories about animals, such as Watership Down, are really about people. The people are merely represented by animals. Stories are told by people, about people, for people.

So, it should come as little surprise that people like to read stories with strong, sympathetic characters to whom they can relate. We all do. Even the plottiest of genre fiction relies on characters to guide the readers through the story. Even so, as I’ve mentioned before in this blog series, when I started writing, all I had in mind was plot. I didn’t care so much about the people stuff happened to, just about what happened.

Like a bad friend, I was using people to get from plot point to plot point. Even though the characters in books had been wonderful friends to me, better friends than a lot of people in real life, I didn’t know how to repay the kindness by letting my own characters be people. In some ways, the very word “character” is misleading. Once I started to see my “characters” as “people” my writing changed dramatically and for the better.

It’s still a struggle. Letting the characters drive the story doesn’t come naturally for me. (In fact, I’ve invited a fellow author to guest post on how to do that later this week, in hopes that I’ll learn something from her.) But it’s a vital struggle. Because every time I let a character surprise me, my stories get richer and deeper and I learn something new about them, and something new about myself.

Here’s the thing about characters: ultimately, they all come from something inside the writer. Whether they are facets of a writer’s personality, or whether they are born of how the writer perceives people outside of themselves, they come from within. And sometimes, writing characters can get us closer to parts of ourselves that we’d rather deny, or perceptions about others that we’d rather not acknowledge. Writing about people has helped me understand myself and others better. When I struggle with a character, it’s usually because I’m afraid to face something that I want to deny in myself or others.

But that’s the beauty of writing. Like childhood play, it allows us to face those things in the safest setting possible. For fiction writers, no one ever even has to guess that the characters are part of us!

Even when I manage to understand my characters clearly, conveying them to the reader can be a challenge. When I first created Stasia, I had a view of her as basically a good person, but a little eccentric, because of her Dreams, and a little rebellious, because of her family situation and her desire to roam. She came off to first readers as a spoiled brat who cared about nothing but herself. My editor helped me see that it wasn’t that Stasia was bad, it was that I had focused too much on her rebellious nature and neglected to convey her charming qualities to the readers.

When a writer understands a character well enough, and has enough skill, to convey the character clearly to the reader, readers can internalize the characters based on their own facets and experiences, and claim ownership. A character becomes a mirror, reflecting the viewer back to his or her self.

At the same time, character is the lense through which the reader views the story. The way a writer manages this lense is by controlling Point of View (POV). Because a clear understanding of POV is essential to creating the experience you want for the reader, I’m going to take a three-post digression to define what POV is, how to choose the right one for your story, and how to avoid breaking your chosen POV.

Tomorrow: 101 TIWIK #24: POV: A Primer

This post is part of a series of 101 Things I Wish I’d Known Before I Wrote My First Book. Start reading the series at the beginning.

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