)
){kind=small}
Dr Naomi Wood, author and Creative Writing lecturer, discusses what makes a believable and compelling character, and, importantly, how to avoid creating unbelievable characters.
How do you ensure your characters are real and believable?
How to create compelling characters? Gosh, I don’t know – even after fifteen years of teaching. But that uncertainty makes me human, and I suppose that that uncertainty is a good place to start.
Perhaps let’s start with un-compelling characters, and see where that gets us. This is an easier question to answer. Un-compelling characters are those who are too certain, and are too certainly one thing. They are too much a villain, too much a hero, too much a Casanova, or whatever. These characters – as people – are not real.
In real, compelling characters – and I suppose I’m talking about a realist, Western tradition here – characters need to have minor traits that, in author George Saunders’ terms, ‘cross-paint’ with their major traits to add depth and complexity. These are over-exaggerations, but examples might be: a psychologically-regulated Prima Ballerina; a tradwife with a persecutory mothering style; a scaredy-cat airline pilot.
Compelling characters are those who are alive, fluid, unfixed and open.
When you nail your character to a mast and say: this is what they are, this is how they have been, this is how they will always be, you are fixing them too securely. ‘Never,’ wrote Grace Paley, ‘deny your character the chance of an open future.’ To me, compelling characters are those who are alive, fluid, unfixed and open.
If a character becomes too fixed, a reader will begin to predict their next move, their next reaction, and thus the next scene: 'Oh look, angry Anna reacted angrily again to her tradwife mother’s persecution!' When the story meets our reader’s expectation of what’s going to happen next, all the tension goes up in a puff of air.
There is a magnificent scene in Elena Ferrante’s Days of Abandonment where Olga, the protagonist, gets into a fight with another woman about her aggressive dog. What’s so interesting about this scene, through the lens of character, is that Ferrante gives Olga the opportunity to backtrack. Ferrante allows her uncertainty. She ‘cross-paints’ her aggression with abrupt tenderness. Charles Baxter in Burning Down the House writes that ‘the fallacy of much fiction is that in any particular moment we are feeling one emotion, when in fact we are feeling many emotions at once, many of them contradictory, such as lust and gloom.’ Ferrante has Olga pivot through about five or six contradictory emotions in this scene, and under her control, it’s extraordinary.
How do you develop a character before writing?
One theory of character development, and another example of ‘cross-painting’, is Will Storr’s excellent idea of a character’s ‘sacred flaw’. This is where we study what a character holds as sacred (i.e. 'my work/romance/family/real estate will heal me completely') in order to find the character’s most ‘rampant irrationality’. What they cherish and chase will unlock what they are willing to sacrifice. Ask your character: what do you find sacred? And what will you destroy to get it?
My characters are facets of me: and I’ve come to know myself quite well
This layering of sophisticated contradiction comes out slowly and organically over the course of many drafts. When I start writing from a particular character’s point of view, I don’t really develop them beforehand – mostly because my characters are facets of me: and I’ve come to know myself quite well, over these four decades here.
But what I mustn’t do is let the characters become unsurprising. I must let them range through many modes of meeting the world. I believe in therapy this would be called ‘rotating self states’ and this variety of character traits and actions can only make them richer, more credible, and more compelling. If, in Fitzgerald’s terms, ‘plot is character, character is plot’, creating compelling characters drives the plot forward without a huge amount of intense structural work.
What do you consider when choosing a protagonist’s name?
With cross painting, I think that we are closer to an answer of what makes a compelling character. But what of names though? Vexed things. They need to be culturally appropriate, of course, and appropriate to the era and context that they find themselves in, but I don’t stress about them too much. Mostly, I want something not too elaborate and somewhat invisible but with a hidden pulse of meaning. Sometimes I will audition names and then, just like a baby’s name, when you find the right one, it just… fits.
)
Naomi Wood is the bestselling author of The Godless Boys, Mrs. Hemingway and The Hiding Game. Her novels have won a Jerwood Award, the British Library Hay Festival Prize, and been shortlisted for the Walter Scott Prize, the Dylan Thomas Prize, and the Historical Writers Golden Crown. Her début story collection is This is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things, which includes the 2023 BBC National Short Story Prize winner, ‘Comorbidities’. Her interests are complicated femininity and transgressive motherhood, especially in the modern workplace. She is an Associate Professor of Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia.
)
How to create compelling science fiction
)
How to adapt works for film and TV
)
)