When Characters Don't Attack

When Characters Don’t Attack: Wrestling Them Into Your Plot


You’ve heard authors say (and maybe you, yourself, said), “My characters aren’t doing what I wanted them to do,” or “My characters have taken over my book!”


Tell the men in white coats they can go back to the asylum. It’s OK. They’re not crazy. You’re not crazy.


The thing about characters is that they’re not people. They’re distilled people. Not whole, not real, but merely cut-outs. Given salient details about a person, enough to give them a recognizeable personality, a goal, and a mode of behavior, but they aren’t actually sentient. So, when this well-defined character in your head does something strange as dances out from the keyboard, you wonder: how did he do that? And why? And how the heck do I get him to behave?


For our first answer, let’s look at the human brain. All your life, whether you know it or not, you’ve studied psychology: individual, social, group, behavioral, all of it. Why did Mom leave me? Why does Dad get so angry? How can I make her like me? These questions epitomize the search for motivation.


Mom is motivated by fear. Dad is motivated by his disappointment that life never meets his expectations. Julie is motivated by chocolate and by witty conversation. Your character needs to be motivated, too. Not just a little bit, but VERY motivated. Internally, externally, emotionally, logically, your character needs to have such a good argument for doing something that he could not possibly decide any other behavior.


Our brains make assumptions. We leap to what we think is going to happen, not what actually does happen. How do you think we drive? If we waited for the visual signal of the car in front of us to acctually process, we’d have already hit it. So our brain assumes that the car in front of us is stopping as soon as we see the brake lights and hear the screech of the tires. We don’t have to see it stop. We don’t have to feel the impact of our car hitting theirs. We are compelled by our assumptions, by our motivations, to stop the car.


Maybe we don’t need to slam the brakes, so we spill coffee on ourselves and feel silly. That’s OK. It beats dying. Maybe you overmotivate your character, and only one or two of the motivations you use actually provide real meaning. That’s OK. Go ahead and overmotivate them. But don’t you dare undermotivate.


And undermotivated character is a wildcard. It’s willful; it’s disobedient. It’s like a bored teenager: you don’t know what it’s going to do. It could explode. It could implode. It could turn Goth.


When you hear someone say: “My character did x, when I wanted him to do y,” you know it’s an under-motivated character. The vast computer that is the author’s brain calculated the personality of the character, the stimulus, and the motivation the character feels and came up with bupkis.


Uh-oh.


Time to dig deep into that character’s psyche. Time to examine whether disappointment or chocolate, witty conversation or fear motivates the character, and then provide that in spades for them. Make the situation so bad for the character that he must leap off the building. Make the chocolate smell so good that she must meet the man who baked it. Make the mother so terrified of her own failures that she must leave, to spare her children the heartbreak of her mucked-up life.


Increase the stakes. Drive the tension up. Create circumstances that force the character to do what needs to come next. And any time your character appears to hijack your manuscript, you look them right in the motivations.

A Close Third

Third person point of view(POV) is the most common POV for fiction. Third-person means the narrator is telling a story about some third person (i.e., not you or themselves). Although the days of narration are mostly long behind us, the art and craft of telling a story in third person remains one of the most important skills a writer can master.


A good third-person POV is intimate We may or may not know the thoughts of the character ("limited" if we do not hear their thoughts), but we know their attitude. We see everything through their lens, hovering just behind their ear, along for the ride.


But how do you do it?


If you’re like most writers, your third-person goes something like this: “Amanda walked to the store. She saw the children playing in the sprinklers. From behind her, she smelled the sweet scent of freshly baked cookies. She thought about how much she liked cookies, and how she could use one right about now.”


Using the senses: check. Active construction: check.


“So what’s wrong with that?” you ask.


And I answer with another question: while you’re reading this, where are YOU? You’re with Amanda, sure. But if this were a movie, where is the camera?


It’s somewhere else, looking at Amanda.


Well, heck, if I wanted to watch a movie, I’d go rent one.


No. I want to be IN Amanda. I want to experience her life. I want to be the hero, darn it!


So now, how do we get intimate with Amanda? (Look, I know you are all laughing behind your hands at the double entendre, but focus, grasshoppers, this is important.)


We do it by eliminating as many references to Amanda as we can. We do it by pretending we’re writing a Holodeck program: we can influence the world, but not Amanda. We can react to her, but we can’t make her do anything.


So here’s how it goes. First sentence: “Amanda walked to the store.” How can we make this sentence about her surroundings? Is Amanda tired? Is she happy? We don’t know, so let’s pick one: happy. This influences how she perceives her surroundings.


"The concrete passed underfoot like gray treadmill.” “The miles unspooled behind her.” “The world bounced with her every step, as if jumping for joy.”


Ok, but we haven’t gotten to the store, right? Ah, now you see a major point: showing uses up more words than telling. It “unpacks” the narrative, and brings out experience. And that’s what makes a third-person perspective intimate: the reader becomes the main character, just as completely as in first or the rarely-used second person. So go out there and take the camera out of the sky, or off the ground. Nestle it right behind your POV-character’s ear, and record the sights and sounds from there. Try to limit the number of times you reference your character at all. Let the inanimate objects do the work instead of some distant narrator.

To the Cusp

My parents could have worked in Marketing for any university in the world. All my life, they told me that if I just hung in there, I would go to college, where the professors would take me to the cusp of knowledge, to the very precipice, to the cliff, after which the wide gulf of discovery would open up before me.

The cusp.

That’s where I feel now. Not the cliff my parents talked about, but the crest of a hill. Right now all I can see is my dashboard and the sky, but in a minute or two, my car will level out and I’ll see the wide world of creating verbal art. I’ll see it from the airplane perspective: all geometric fields and woolly forests. Rivers of plot wind through character rills, and the perfect stone outcroppings dot the world like upthrust thumbs.

The sensation started with the gut-level understanding of something that had only lived in my head: stories are manufactured. Everything in them is planned and calculated for effect. They are DESIGNED.

Well, duh. That’s what my head said. Of course they are manufactured. They don’t grow under mushrooms (although a few ideas have grown OUT FROM mushrooms, I must admit).

But my heart did not hear this. My heart heard: I will sit at my keyboard and story shall stream from my fingertips!

Then I picked up Swain. And I believed. Ahh! Cried the angels. I learned even more: climax must be a choice between what is right and what is easy, for both the protagonist and often the antagonist. Then the character should get what he or she deserves: the essence of (not the actual) his goal, or conversely the actual accomplishment, but robbed of meaning. Judgment. Justice.

Stories aren’t real life! Bad guys get punished. People get second chances! Good guys finish, if not first, at least with their dignity intact! Oh my God, how did I never see this?

After that, of course I devoured Stein. And Stein had even more to say: dialogue should be a confrontation. An oblique one. It shouldn’t sound “real”, because you’re only using the meat. But it should be distinguishable, from character to character.

Wow.

And then, the coup de grace: what we want to see is that picture in the pocket that the characters hide from everyone else. That one soul-jerking moment, that one vulnerable spot.

This echoes with what Randall has been teaching: be vulnerable. I read Stein saying the same thing: start with your vulnerable moment. Start with that photo you wouldn’t show your best friend, that the paramedics would find upon searching your pockets, and you’d be mortified (dead!) if you knew they saw it: the dirty undies of your soul.

And here I am, encased in this knowledge, cresting this hill: I get it. I get it, and I’m ready to DO it. I will dive into the gulf of discovery, taken to the cusp of knowledge by these wonderful authors and editors.

And, after a good swim, I’ll be ready to dive back into these and other books for my next cusp.