Start With Story

Characters are what makes a story come alive, as anyone would agree. Whether you prefer books, audiobooks, comic books, plays, movies, or TV shows, you hopefully recognize that the most compelling storyline of all time will be ruined by an unsympathetic character, a boring voice, a hated actor. Characters are what bring the story to the audience in a way they can understand, a personification of the struggles of the human race, an embodiment of good, evil, or any shade in between. A story would be dead without its characters, and so to avoid the literary morgue we must include them.

But here’s the thing about your characters: they don’t drive everything, at least not at first. I’m probably committing heresy on some level here, but the truth is that a character without a story goes nowhere. A character may be the most fabulous human, alien, animal or any other creature in existence, but if they have no story they remain in cages, dimensionless and uninteresting. Purposeless. So you have a 15-year-old high school sophomore who has a buzz cut and wears his wrestling headpiece everywhere he goes? If we want to know more about him, that more comes with story. Maybe you have a 25-year-old nursing intern with a blond ponytail, shy smile, a pair of running shoes she wears every day and a man’s name tattooed on her right bicep? If we want answers, we want story. A dad with three kids, who works at an insurance company for fifteen years even though he hates it? Story.

Even in the files we writers keep on individual characters (or maybe it’s just me?) we want to know the story. It’s nice that our female lead is an elven archer, 5’ 10”, angular face, blonde hair to her waist, piercing violet eyes, a quick runner, wears a brown cloak over a dark green tunic to blend into the forest … but see? I almost fell asleep writing that. As readers, we don’t really care as long as we get a basic image to work with. We don’t want a laundry list of the physical characteristics involved in each character. We want to know what name is tattooed on that intern’s arm and why it’s there. We want to know why the high school kid wears his wrestling headpiece all the time. We want to know what keeps the dad at this job he hates. We want to get to know the characters, not just what they look like. We want their likes and dislikes, strengths and weaknesses. We want their story.

This goes for nonfiction, too. We need to get to know the people we’re writing about, whether in reality or in our imaginations. I could tell you my height, weight, hair color, eye color, number of siblings, occupation, or location, but that doesn’t make you care about me. It describes my exterior, but has little bearing on your understanding of me – unless you’re trying to track me down, in which case I would suggest you abandon that plan immediately. But if I tell you that I’ve been writing for all my life, but never shared most of it with the world; if I say I’ve moved eight times in my lifetime; if I tell you I’ve struggled with depression for nearly three years, but have retained my faith in spite of it – you see? You know who I am more than when you began to read this. You know me better now.

And, if I were a fictional character, you would care more. You would want to know what happened, how I got to where I am today, how I’ve dealt with all the highs and lows. You would want to know what happens next, how my battles continue, how my story ends. If I were a historical figure, one you were familiar with already, you would want to know how I went from that point in my life to do the great things you know me for. If I were a friend our mutual friend was trying to describe to you, you’d wonder what effect we would have on each other and developed a friendship.

So our characters must be compelling, yes, absolutely. But what makes our characters compelling is their stories. That doesn’t mean that you explain the first time our main character sees that nursing intern that the tattoo, which includes the name “Samuel,” was designed by her boyfriend who died in a tragic car accident five years ago. It doesn’t mean when someone sees that dad in traffic that we let the reader know the dad works at the insurance company because it’s one of the last places the government could relocate him to for his own and his family’s protection. It doesn’t mean when we’re trying to introduce mutual friends over written communications that we explain everything we know about them to each other before letting them say hello. What it does mean is that we let each character’s story drive them, and then the characters can drive your story.