Writing Secrets: What brings characters to life?

I don’t know about you, but there are characters from books that I remember quite as clearly as the people I grew up with. They are as real to me, and they helped shape the person I became just as strongly.

What is it that makes a character memorable, in fiction or non-fiction? What gives them substance and makes them as tangible as those we’ve known in real life?

I know that writers worry about this and, one of our participants recently asked: “How do we avoid making our characters stereotypical?”

Firstly, I think the secret is in their depth and complexity. People we meet for the first time in real life can seem like stereotypes. In fact, we often draw conclusions on the way they speak or dress. We condemn people as self-righteous snobs or dumb reactionaries, or whatever.

But if we get to know them better, we discover there’s more to them. They’re kind, or terribly vulnerable, or they suffered a great loss and sacrificed a great deal … As we understand them more fully, we uncover aspects that surprise or move us; that are contradictory.

So firstly, you need to know your character better than you know your friends. It’s difficult to discover everything there is to know about another real person. There’s much about all of us that we struggle to recognise – we lack the insight – or that we would be loath to admit to.

It’s this complexity that you set out to discover, in a non-fiction character – as much as you are able, anyway. And it’s what you aim to create in a fictional person.

You’ll give them lives, before your story began, incidents your readers will never know about, but which have triggered certain responses in them. It’s what your characters have taken from their past experiences that makes them unique.

They might speak and dress as you would expect people from their particular milieu to speak and dress. But there’s more to them, because they’ve gone through different experiences, and taken from them different realisations. Their character traits have developed differently from the norm. They have a surprising philosophy…

But then it’s the way you present them on the page that will make them memorable. No-one remembers, or regards as great, a character who is explained in great slabs of authorial information.

We remember characters whose actions and words show them to be unforgettable. Their thoughts and feelings draw us to identify with them. We are intrigued by their loves, hates and simple dislikes; the artefacts with which they surround themselves, and which show them to be discerning or naïve in their tastes; their predictability, and their surprises, in facing what life throws at them.

It’s just like life, only more so.

As Italian novelist Elena Ferrante says: “Great novelists conjure human beings under stress without making them case studies.”