Writing Characters

So it took me about twenty years to figure out something pretty fundamental about writing characters. I just finished a story about this kid, his father (who thinks he’s a god) and his mother (a depressed alcoholic). When I first started writing it, the story focused almost exclusively on the boy and his dad; the mother was just a sideshow, a sort of shrill mommy dearest who popped in every so often to inject some arbitrary malevolence.

But she evolved as the story did, so that, by the end, she became — in my mind, at least — a fully-formed, three dimensional person. Still an alcoholic, still criminally neglectful of her son, still shrill — but a real person who arrived at her plight for real reasons. A tragic figure.

Unfortunately, she didn’t quite make the transition on the page. The woman in the story that I turned in a couple of weeks ago is several steps above the cardboard harridan she started out as, but she’s still not much to look at. Still pointlessly vindictive, I think, and still prone to acts whose meanness is either odd or just outright inexplicable.

I didn’t give her a fair shake, and I feel terrible about it. Not because I’ve written something badly. Jobs knows, if I self-flagellated every time I committed that particular sin I’d be a mass of quivering scar tissue by now. I feel terrible because I didn’t give her the respect she deserves. Because I think you have a responsibility to the people you create: you don’t have to go easy on them, or make them sympathetic, or even like them, particularly. But you have to respect them. You have to give them their due, and let them grow into people, and invest the time and effort necessary to communicate who they are.

What’s worse is that I wasn’t just being lazy. There was a part of me that thought the plot would be better served if I left her just a tad undeveloped — if I made her do stuff that she plainly would not. I was wrong about that too. Because character is plot, of course, or at least its most atomic element. If you tinker with that — if you’re at all dishonest with your basic materials — then you warp the whole thing.

I mean, yes, the story may not fall out the way you want if you just let the characters be who they are. But then again, it wasn’t supposed to.