In fiction, as in life, if you try
to control people too much, they become tiresome. You have to treat your
characters the way you treat your family and friends. Let them solve their own
problems. Let them have their foibles. Let them make their own mistakes. Writers know that solving
problems too soon or asking your characters to be perfect are the death knells for
the plot.
I
recently attended a session for writers given by novelist Paula d’Etcheverry, a
former successful romance writer who now has set her sites on other genres. She
gave a great talk. I receive a few priceless nuggets anytime I listen to
another writer. This time, the nuggets were about characterization and how that
relates to keeping the plot interesting.
“Until
we know what a character wants, we don’t know what the story is about,” Paula
wrote in her handout. And also, “Until we know what the stakes are, we don’t
care.”
Wise
words, indeed. Sometimes we forget that the readers don’t, and shouldn’t, know
all that we know about our characters. We have to illustrate their dilemma
through their words and deeds.
Paula
has her own way of creating interesting characters. She bases them on
archetypes—heroes, bad guys, helpers, guardians, truth tellers, etc. To a
certain extent, we all have those archetypes embedded in our psyches from past
stories and from our own experiences.
Here
is the danger: the word archetype and the word stereotype are dangerously close
in meaning. Besides that, the word type is one-half of those two compound
words. And type is the root word of typical. No writer wants his or her
characters to be typical because typical is boring. It’s a fine line to walk
between typecast characters and real, human, breathing characters who
reverberate within the recesses of our soul. It’s up to the writer to walk that
fine line so that the reader never discerns the balancing act.
Those
of us who enjoy a more organic method of writing fiction will never sit down
and chart characters based on a list of archetypes. For many of us, that is
just too pat. But Paula makes the point, and I think she’s right, that without
archetypes, stories are too weird for the reader to comprehend.
Here
are some helpful lists she gave us. Interesting goals for characters: win,
escape, stop, and retrieve. Interesting characteristics for characters:
sympathy, jeopardy, likability, humor, and power. Those are all true but a good
plot with good characters is so much more. Sometimes I think that it’s simply a
gift of the gods.
My published novels, The Legend of Juan Miguel and The Passion of Juan Miguel are available on Amazon.com.
