If you want readers to fall in love with your novels, writing great characters is crucial. When readers feel connection to your characters, it’s easy to get lost in the world you’ve created. Read 5 lessons modern novels give us in writing vivid characters:
Lesson 1: Make characters surprise each other and the reader
Great characters are often revealed in stages rather than all at once. Allow characters to surprise each other and your readers, too, with dramatic (but credible) changes.
Let’s explore an example: Mr. Darcy in Pride and Prejudice. Although Jane Austen published Pride and Prejudice in 1813, it holds its own against more contemporary novels as an example of ‘the modern novel’. The modern novel is typically a longer work of fiction exploring (among other things) individual characters’ inner lives within ‘the social structures of everyday life’.
Mr. Darcy, the protagonist Elizabeth Bennet’s eventual lover, is a classic example of a character who surprises us as the story unfolds.
Darcy at first appears to be aloof and proud, as he lacks social graces. When we first meet Darcy at a ball, Austen shows this. The other attendees find Darcy ‘disagreeable’:
‘[H]e was looked at with great admiration for about half the evening, till his manners gave a disgust which turned the tide of his popularity; for he was discovered to be proud; to be above his company, and above being pleased; and not all his large estate in Derbyshire could then save him from having a most forbidding, disagreeable countenance…’
Lizzie Bennet at first has a negative impression of Darcy too, especially after she overhears him telling his friend Mr. Bingley he won’t ask Lizzie to dance because she is ‘tolerable, but not handsome enough to tempt me.’
By Chapter 6, however, Austen reveals Darcy’s growing infatuation with Lizzie:
‘Mr. Darcy had at first scarcely allowed her to be pretty; he had looked at her without admiration at the ball … But no sooner had he made it clear to himself and his friends that she hardly had a good feature in her face, than he began to find it was rendered uncommonly intelligent by the beautiful expression of her dark eyes.’
Lizzie’s dislike of Darcy at first intensifies when it appears Darcy interfered in a budding courtship between Charles Bingley and Lizzie’s sister, Jane. Yet in a lengthy letter, Darcy explains why he intervened and the more Lizzie (and the reader) see of his character, the more his fair and ‘gentlemanly’ nature becomes clear. This produces a change in Lizzie’s feelings ultimately.
Mr. Darcy is misjudged by others based on partial information, and Lizzie (and the reader) realise the pitfalls of the ‘prejudice’ of the title. This element of surprise and revelation makes Darcy a fascinating character. We see both how the character comes across at first encounter, and the truths that may surprise us once we get past first impressions and assumptions.
Lesson 2: Give characters interesting flaws
Writing great characters is impossible when all your characters are without fault. What makes us interesting are our contradictions, internal conflicts, our light and shade. If all your characters are beautiful, kind and well-spoken in every scene, where is the friction?
Characters’ flaws contribute to a story in multiple ways. They create:
- Challenges and conflicts: A character who is arrogant, for example, will invite hostility from other characters. This could make it hard to achieve goals requiring collaboration
- Motivations and goals: Characters who are afraid of failure (for example) will likely push themselves harder to attain goals (for example athletic excellence). Their possible flaw (perfectionism) can thus also be a strong source of motivation
In Toni Morrison’s novel Jazz (1992), the central character Violet Trace is nicknamed ‘Violent’ because she assaults the corpse of her husband Joe’s mistress at the funeral. Morrison gives Violet common flaws of pride and vengeance:
‘She is awfully skinny, Violet; fifty, but still good looking when she broke up the funeral. You’d think that being thrown out the church would be the end of it – the shame and all – but it wasn’t. Violet is mean enough and good looking enough to think that even without hips or youth she could punish Joe by getting herself a boyfriend and letting him visit in her own house.’ (p.2)
The flaw Morrison gives Violet becomes a character motivation for further actions. Violet carries out her need to vengefully reclaim power in various ways. She sets the birds her and Joe keep free through the windows ‘to freeze or fly’ (p. 1) and starts an affair of her own.
The flaw Morrison gives Violet (a wrathful, vengeful nature) makes her act out in interesting, compelling ways after Joe’s betrayal. Writing great characters means showing this cause and effect; how characters’ behaviour impacts each other and draws out mutual flaws as well as strengths.
