Serpentine Squiggles

Actions Are Louder

On Writing Characters

On my discord, this series of questions was asked:

I started typing up a quick answer and — whoops, here's another essay. Where to start? How about something pointed:

There are no characters, only actions.  The illusion of ‘character’, then, arises from an urge to correlate actions to some underlying reality beyond the page.

If you have a problem with your characters, then, my answer is to improve the actions, not the implied reality.  I personally do little work on characters outside of writing them (or imagining them) in context, and I think it's unnecessary to do more than that.  It feels a bit like recording one’s practice for a live concert, noticing an error and fiddling with the practice recording when it's most important to fix the playing.

Analogies aside, then, this framing tells us one thing: for a character to be interesting, it must either be a series of interesting actions, or an interesting series of action.  (Of course, the ideal is both.)

I think most people have a fine sense of when an action is interesting — it's the things that makes you go ‘oh man that's cool’ or ‘ha, nice’ or just ‘damn’.  

But to add on to this sense, to compliment it, it’s important to distinguish a truly dramatic action from what is merely behavior.  To say that a character takes an action, ultimately, is to say that another character wouldn’t take that action.  Breathing is not an action, and flinching from pain is not really an action — but not flinching from pain?  That says something, reveals something.  It is, forgive me, characteristic.

When a character engages in rote behavior, it may be helpful to stop and ask if they could instead act characteristically.  It’s useful to, rather than ask “what would this character do?”, instead ask “what action reveals the most character?”  If a character’s actions are windows into an imagined underlying reality, then the interesting action is the window with a clear view, a new angle, a dramatic vista.  Paint the window, even, if you have to.

While an interesting actions are rather easy to pin down, by contrast an interesting series has more variables; it can’t quite be held in your mind all at once.  But I think the tools to navigate it are just those I introduced in Ur-development; after all, a character (which is to say, their actions) is just a subset of a story.

For a series of actions to be interesting, then, means they reflect a fruitful juxtaposition — a defining contrast, a defining logic.

To tie this back to your struggles, then, what you're looking for is not a list of “traits”, but proper sentences: a character should have a dynamic, such that it's unnatural to describe them without ‘but’s or ‘so’s.  “He's a knight, but he has no sense of morals.”  “She wants to save the world, so she'll turn away no one willing to help.”

If I had to dissect the anatomy of character... well, there'd be no template, each one is unique — perhaps for this, one, a metaphorical appendage is atrophied, while in this one, there is a gland which knows no analogue in the conventional.  By all known laws, this shouldn't be able to fly, but—

Still, to put forth a practical bauplan, the way I'd cut it first would probably be past, present and future.  Or to give more useful labels to those: history, context and direction.  (These is, I’ll admit, not quite a fully original framing, though mine has mutated some.)  

History is the backstory, whatever secrets and traumas or inspiring moments lead us to this particular character.  Context is the present moment, the relation to wider worlds, both for setting — do they live in a city or a wasteland?  Rich or poor? — and more importantly, their relation to other characters, who they love or hate, who they're indebted to or master over.  Finally, direction is where the character is going.  This is both their explicit goals (as after all, every character should want something, even if it's a glass of water), but this is also any unforeseen unfoldings. (Are they on a path of self-destruction?  Are they running out of goodwill from those around them?  None of this will be a goal, but it's nascent in their history and context.)

Any of these can be interesting.  You can start with an archetype — from the sound of it, your characters are already plenty archetypal — and then put a twist on some facet.  Do they come from an unexpected background given their status?  An easy way to give is there being more to learn about character — so do they have a secret?  What is their relationship to the other characters — do they have someone to bounce off of, someone they contrast against?  They doubtless have a goal, but no one is singularly driven; what other goals do they have, and do any of them conflict or compromise their central goal?

This lens is useful at the broadest level, but it feels a bit like defining a vertebrate by reference to the head, thorax and abdomen.  Integral, sure, but there’s no reference to legs or internal organs, let alone whether it has a menacing set of teeth, a wild color pattern or wicked horns.

What might I append to this model?  For one, an axis that ranges from physical to psychological and social.  Each of these qualifiers adds nuance to the three aspect, but the fit is a bit looser.

The physical history may include injuries and disabilities, but also unchanging facts of birth, appearance and aptitudes.  Physical context would obviously entail health and fitness, but I’d also toss in how they dress and groom themselves.  And for physical direction, this might be the most anemic, but important character arcs — coming of age, growing old, dying — fit well here.

Psychological history is naturally those vaunted traumas and habits and instilled beliefs.  In psychological context, I’d put what’s common thought of as a character's inner life: their emotions and opinions.  Finally, psychological direction becomes the most iconic form of character development, the eventual evolution of their feelings and outlook.

I suspect you get it, at least enough to be unsurprised by how the pattern completes; social history is past associates, prejudices and reputations, family and pedigree, while social context is your friends and status, and social direction is career ambitions, life scripts, and so forth.

Now that’s a lot of different categories to work out, but it’s a mistake to see these as blanks to paint within in order to get a complete character.  If you did that for every character, then given the amount of pipe needed to convey all of these facts to the reader, the result would either be clutter or unseen, wasted work.  

And this not even a complete picture; what I’ve described so far might be a the theory of a character, and the practice is different still: it’s the actual actions they take, as informed by that 'theory'.  And those actions can themselves be split up: trivial actions like nervous tics or speech patterns, simple actions they take within a scene, and the bigger, abstract actions composed of those simple actions in total.  And actions themselves come in different types: there is what a character says, versus what a character does to the world, and what a character does to other characters.  (And those themselves have inner differentiates: how does a character talk to this one versus that one?  What do they do this part of the world versus that one?)

This last point is a more general one: there is no character, only characters.  Each one, given enough screentime, contains multitudes.  This isn’t just mere banality of arcs (of course a character can be different at the end than at the beginning), but distinctions and exceptions within their own behavior.  A character is not the same one when angry, or in their element, stripped of their connections or right at home.  It’s all so much.

So instead, I present all these classifications as colors, tools.  If a character is defined by how their characteristic actions differ from usual behavior, then they’ll only really be defined by some of these categories — no one is unique in every possible way.  So instead, just ask what your character does, and why.  Is it because of their unique history, current context, chosen direction?  How do you identify them from those around them — are they physically different, psychologically, socially?

Even though I say they aren’t blanks to always be filled in, they do, in fact, have an answer in any true reality of a story, and it’s not devoid of information.  There is no default history, appearance, or mannerisms — but, since you can’t and shouldn’t make every classification a vibrant locus of interest, how do you fill in those blanks?  I’ve already given the answer: archetypes.

And you can start there, but really, why start with an archetype?  A Chimerical Hope gets a lot of compliments for character writing, and some of this is earned from skill (Yanseno, Boleheva, Quessa are all original creations), but a distinguishing feature of chimhop, more than any other project of mine, is that it relies on expies rather than the truly new characters.  Lift a character from a story you love, and plop them down into your world.  You'll need to iterate and twist them to get them to truly fit in your world anyway, and that development will naturally add interest to the character (who, if you loved them so much, must have been a good character to begin with).

(In a way, I suppose I'm telling you to never stop writing fanfic :p)

Though if you're worried about the ripoff seeming too obvious, you can deliberately twist them in any of the above proposed ways (e.g., Superman, but he was never adopted; Applejack, but she has no siblings; Taylor Hebert, but she doesn't want to be a hero).  This will make them fresh even if readers recognize them.

Still, if you're really worried, you can make a double expy; blend two good characters together.  This will have appeal — the seams and contrasts between the two characters will themselves create interest, and in doing this, there's a sort of intrinsic originality to it.  While your perception of a character will always be unique to you, when blending two characters, two different writers will pick out different elements from each characters.  There's a single way of writing one character, and a few ways of taking a character and knocking a few gears out of alignment, but the number of ways to mix and match character elements is exponential in the number of distinct elements.

Which, I think, gets to the heart of what makes a worthwhile character.  This is held in common with what makes a good plot, a good setting, a good sentence.  In part, it's merely logical interrelation and appeal (which is to say, being just dang cool), but the magic ingredient that makes them all pop is specificity, concreteness — dare I say it, reification.  

Perhaps I'm projecting — right now, I'm in a similar position working on the current arcs of A Chimerical Hope — but I think an issue you're having is that you're seeking an analytical solution.  You have a plan, a central idea, a bottom line written, and you're fleshing out the steps to there from the beginning.  Along the way, every addition you add is in some sense pointed at that core idea.  Put simply, you're asking yourself, "given my conclusion, what's the most optimal way to write this?"  At least, that's what I'm doing

And I think the key is to stop looking for analytical solutions, and start doing numerical solutions.  If a character is an underlying reality pointed to by the actions they take, then the key to selling that is to make those actions feel like they must be a part of something more, that it's not just a bad actor reading a script, but a real character that escapes the lines of the story.  And for that, it has to be a little bit messy.  There have to be bits that aren't part of the grand design, that don’t serve an obvious purpose — elements there only for texture, for flavor, for color.

An analytical solution is calculating the exact answer given a complete equation; a numerical solution is guessing, iterating, getting something close enough to suffice.

Trying to get characteristics analytically is too slow, too hard to optimize, too much, in practice, like simply spinning your wheels.  Instead, add something for the sake of it, something spontaneous, unnecessary.

Your subconscious mind, I suspect, is so helpless here because your conscious mind is dominating the process.  Ease off it a little, and see if that helps?