One reason Characters are a pain

Characters are even more of a pain than live people.

Most folks do not find it terribly surprising when someone complains that they don’t understand a real, live person. (One’s partner and/or children may complain bitterly about not being understood, but they’re not surprised.) People implicitly acknowledge the truth that people are complicated and have lots of non-obvious reasons for doing whatever they do.

Writers, though, are expected to understand their characters. If you complain about your characters doing something unexpected, or not cooperating with your plot, or not understanding them in general, other fiction writers will nod and commiserate. Everyone else will look at you as if you are nuts and says, “But you make them up!”

What non-writers don’t think about is this:

Context is vital to understanding someone. Current circumstances are a big part of context, but so is life experience (and by “life experience,” I mean “everything that has ever happened to a person from the day they were born until right now). Real live people are hard to understand because, while we have large areas of similarity in experience (everybody sleeps, eats, etc.), not even identical twins have exactly the same experience. One falls in the lake; the other doesn’t. One has nightmares about drowning; the other has nightmares about being left the lone survivor.

If one has to understand a person’s current circumstances and life experience in order to understand why they do what they do, it follows that in order to fully understand one’s characters, one has to understand their current circumstances and life experience.

Which means the writer has to make those things up. In detail.

Personally, I have neither the time nor the interest in making up a detailed minute-by-minute biography for every single character in a book. Most writers I know don’t even do that for their protagonist. I certainly don’t. I know some things about my key characters, but the “biography” I started with for my current fourteen-year-old protagonist was about a half-page of notes. The 40-something-year-old villain got a couple of sentences. The other characters were mostly a list of names, relationships, and plot functions. They developed as I wrote.

Many of them behaved as fully developed characters from the moment they walked into my head. This one is a bit timid. That one is trying too hard, which annoys everyone else. The other one is gloomy and depressed and has a different speech pattern from anyone else in the story. I can write them spot on, consistently.

What I can’t do, most of the time, is explain to curious readers why those characters are the way they are and do the things they do. There are loads of possible reasons why that one is timid, but I didn’t know she was going to be timid in quite that way until she walked onto the page. I certainly didn’t begin by making up a string of life circumstances that ended up with her being reluctant to assert herself. I can see plenty of things in the general backstory that could have had that result, so it’s a perfectly plausible way for her to behave, given her overly aggressive older siblings and the cultural constraints on a woman of her presumed social status.

But I don’t know whether she’s always been timid, or whether some specific incident in her youth or young adulthood made her risk-averse. I also didn’t know she had a (suppressed) talent for engineering, until it cropped up in some other character’s gossip. I had to write my way into those things.

This is also why villains are both particularly difficult and particularly interesting for many writers. A character seldom needs much justification for being a “good guy,” even if they’re faced with difficult moral decisions. Unless one’s villain is a sociopath who considers “right” and “wrong” irrelevant, they do need personal justifications for coming down on the “evil” side – justifications that spring from their individual life experience and context.

Unfortunately, villains frequently commit most of their crimes and machinations offstage. As a result, the writer has much less word count in which to explore their context and figure out their life experience (and display it convincingly to the reader). In a single-viewpoint novel, where the viewpoint character is the protagonist or his/her sidekick, it becomes easy to leave the villain’s motivations only half-explained. The POV character doesn’t really care why the villain is committed to the “wrong” choice, they just want to stop him/her and thwart the evil plan.

Even when the author has worked out the villain’s motivations (and the context and life experiences that led them to this point), the lack of stage time for the villain tends to over-simplify their motivations. The long, slow destruction of the villain’s trust in institutions in general and doctors in particular becomes “he’s tearing down the hospital as revenge for his mother’s death on the operating table” or even just “it’s because of childhood trauma.”

A multiple-viewpoint structure allows for a lot more stage time (and thus character development) for the villain, but not all stories are suited to that format. The only other option is to make any of the villain’s on-stage scenes (and any discussion of the villain and their plans) as dense with implication as possible.