Characterisation

A reader recently asked me whether I start my stories with the characters outlined in advance or they emerge, as it were, as the story develops. It was a great question I hadn’t considered consciously before, mostly because my feeble attempts to outline the plot of a story in advance have invariably ended in failure, so I haven’t even tried it with characters.

I revere authors with the ability to sketch out a story (the what), build the plot (the how), create the characters to bring all that together, and then follow that plot to create a gripping short story or novel. I lack that ability. Writing for me, as I told that reader, is essentially a walk in thick fog, with shapes emerging from the air soup. These shapes are always human and they are doing interesting things, so I try to get closer to see where these interesting things will take them. I’ve heard this approach called “character-driven” but to me, every story is character-driven. Stories are, after all, texts describing how someone — or something — is doing, or not doing, something. That’s true even for so-called “plot-driven” fiction, and there’s a very simple reason for this. You can’t have a good plot without believable, well-built characters.

I have fond memories of my literature classes in university. I hated almost every second of the time I was forced to spend on characterisation, which involved dissecting a protagonist’s personality and actions, and their importance for the story. The rebel in me just wanted to leave the stories alone and enjoy them as they were meant to be enjoyed. Until we came to “Sons and Lovers” and I discovered two things: first, D. H. Lawrence was a weirdo, but a brilliant one, and two, characters weren’t just the wheels moving a plot along. They were the whole car and the plot was the road. And cars take a lot of engineering, design, and assembly work to be safe, fast, and, not least, attractive.

When I realised Fros’s story was not going to end with the Limburger incident, I started reading criminology books. Sure, I’ve spent a lot of my life reading and re-reading the greatest classics of the crime genre but that wasn’t going to be enough. I had two years of basic psychology under my academic belt but that wasn’t enough either. My usual approach to character personality and behaviour comes down to “If Protagonist is A and B, then she would also be C and D” but I had to know more about the other letters of the alphabet if I were to make my detective story fit for the suspension of disbelief writing folk strives for.

“Mindhunter” helped immensely although I learned things no sane human would want to learn. “A Journey into Darkness” served more of those things that no one in their right mind would want to know. A couple of criminal psychology textbooks also helped — and in the process ruined my reading pleasure because characters who would’ve otherwise looked and sounded believable and realistic were now revealed as neither, including, in one notable instance, the characters of an author who cited “Mindhunter” as inspiration for a series of the least believable stories ever written in modern English.

I still haven’t learned all the letters of the alphabet. I haven’t even learned half, when it comes to characterisation. But I think I’ve learned enough of them to be confident that if Fros has a conscience and a heightened, if warped, sense of justice — which she does — she would be seeking retribution for her actions, consciously or not. If Peter is so paternally protective of Tal he will have a reckless tendency, because all parents tend to be reckless when their children face some kind of danger. Finally, real-life events from the recent past have confirmed what I have long suspected: evil begins when you start treating people like objects. Now you’ll have to excuse me, because my protagonist is about to figure out who the killer is.