Chapter Seven

The Resurrection of Character

“As a writer, I demand the right to write any character in the world that I want to write. I demand the right to be them, I demand the right to think them, and I demand the right to tell the truth as I see they are.”
—Quentin Tarantino

The most common complaint I hear from editors who pass on the stories I send them is this: I just didn’t connect with the character. It isn’t easy to create heroes and heroines readers will follow for three hundred pages and then wait for expectantly in a subsequent novel. But it is critical to your success as a storyteller.

And you can’t stop at bringing your protagonist to life on the page; the most endearing stories pitch their protagonists against worthy antagonists who challenge them on every level—mental, physical, emotional, even spiritual. These stories are also peopled with a supporting cast—family and friends, neighbors and co-workers who together serve as the community in which your protagonist lives and loves, providing ample fodder for your main storyline as well as subplots. These are the characters who give you the room and the opportunity for your hero to grow, scene by scene and book by book.

Let’s take a look at some of the techniques you can use to make your characters resonate with readers—and pull them deeply into your story.

Shape-Shifting for Writers

“The characters in my novels are my own unrealized possibilities. That is why I am equally fond of them all and equally horrified by them. Each one has crossed a border that I myself have circumvented.”
—Milan Kundera

Tana French is a stage actor associated with the PurpleHeart Theatre Company in Dublin, Ireland. Fannie Flagg has appeared on Broadway, on television, and in movies as an actress and comedienne. Maya Angelou was an actress, a singer, and a dancer who toured Europe in Porgy and Bess and appeared in the groundbreaking off-Broadway production of Jean Genet’s The Blacks. James Franco, Tina Fey, Woody Allen, Ethan Hawke, Amy Poehler, Steve Martin, Carrie Fisher, Molly Ringwald, Julie Andrews … the list of actors who are also successful writers goes on and on. Not to mention the great Bard himself, William Shakespeare.

Writers who create characters readers love (and love to hate) are shape-shifters. Like professional actors, professional writers fully inhabit their characters. They write them from the inside out—and the proof is in the power these charismatic characters hold over readers.

When actors prepare for a role, they go beyond the script. If an actor is playing a surgeon, he observes surgeons in the operating room. If an actress is playing a pregnant teenager, she talks to pregnant teens. When Bradley Cooper played Navy SEAL Chris Kyle in the movie American Sniper, he was unable to meet Kyle before he died, so he spent a lot of time with Kyle’s father. He gained thirty-five pounds and mastered Kyle’s tricky Texan drawl. He even wore the shoes Kyle wore during three tours in Iraq.

You should approach creating a character with the same vigilance. Is your protagonist a beat cop? A physics professor? A pastry chef? Who is your heroine—and what do you know about who she is and what she does?

Good writers, like good actors, do their due diligence. So if your hero is a homicide detective—and you aren’t—then interview a real one. People like to talk about what they do. Go for a ride-along; get to know what homicide cops are really like. Then you can write a believable homicide cop, one whom readers will follow happily through your story as she solves crimes and apprehends criminals.

Most of us define ourselves by what we do—and readers admire competency and authenticity.

No matter what your heroine does—and she should do something, as readers now expect characters to have paying jobs, unless they’re stay-at-home moms (which is the hardest job of all, she said, having done it herself). If your character is retired, give him volunteer work or a hobby. If she’s a teenager, give her obsessions and ambitions and interests. Make an appointment to interview someone who does what your protagonist does—and ask away!

Make Your Hero, Uh, Heroic

Your protagonist should be likable—or at least admirable in some way. We should be willing to pay several dollars for the pleasure of spending several hours in his company.

Give us someone worthy of the title hero. Give us Katniss Everdeen volunteering to take her little sister’s place in the Hunger Games. Or James Bond, saving civilization from yet another evil genius. Or young Anne Frank, struggling to stay sane and hopeful in a nightmare world run by grown-ups gone mad with malevolence.

Even if your hero is not so likable, he should be impressive enough in some way to demand our continued attention. Think of Sherlock Holmes, who’s smart enough to demand our respect and loyalty. Or the selfish and manipulative Scarlett O’Hara, whose extraordinary survival skills dazzle us through the horrors of the Civil War. Or Dexter, who may be a serial killer, but he’s a serial killer whose mission to rid the world of all serial killers is one we can applaud.

Remember Richard Thomas? His protagonist was a man who’d lost everything he cared about and was falling down a rabbit hole to hell. But his hero’s journey was so unrelentingly dark, and his actions so increasingly unsympathetic, that the author risked losing his audience. Readers needed to know that however far the hero may have fallen, he would not completely lose his humanity, that there remained a slim hope of redemption. Richard reined in his hero just enough to maintain a shred of his integrity—and I got him a two-book deal.

The most popular heroes are heroic, but they’re not perfect. Readers don’t like perfect. Because perfect isn’t real.

The Devil in You

“Most people carry their demons around with them, buried down deep inside. Writers wrestle their demons to the surface, fling them onto the page, then call them characters.”
—C.K. Webb

Think of J.K. Rowling dreaming up Harry Potter, Steig Larsson envisioning Lisbeth Salander, and Jane Austen fancying Mr. Darcy. These are all iconic characters—and all very different from each other as well as from their creators (at least on the surface). Yet they all have demons that their creators have plumbed to good effect. Who knows how the characters’ demons relate to those that bedevil their creators, who knows … but it’s a safe bet that they do.

We fall in love with these characters because they are so fully realized, so original, and finally, so human. They stand the test of time—and appeal to generations of readers, year in and year out.

“I am an artisan; I need to work with my hands. I would like to carve my novel in a piece of wood. My characters—I would like to have them heavier, more three-dimensional.”
—Georges Simenon

The King of Character

Shakespeare wrote the most haunting characters in all of literature: Hamlet, Ophelia, Othello, Iago, Romeo and Juliet, King Lear, Lady Macbeth … and the list continues. As an actor, Shakespeare played to the audience and created characters who charmed lords and ladies as easily as they charmed the people who bought the penny seats in the pit. His characters are flawed, afflicted with the same fancies and foibles as his fans. And you get the feeling he had fun making them that way.

Which of Shakespeare’s characters most resemble those in your work? Reread or watch the plays in which those characters appear. What are their demons? What are your character’s demons? How can you use those demons to best effect?

These exercises are designed to make you think about the forces that have shaped your protagonist. You need to know your heroine inside and out, as well as her past, present, and future. This knowledge will inform your storytelling and drive your heroine’s actions and reactions as your story unfolds. But this is not necessarily knowledge the reader needs to know. You’re just doing your homework so you can create a well-rounded, proactive protagonist readers will love.

Taking Your Best Shots

“You don’t really understand an antagonist until you understand why he’s a protagonist in his own version of the world.”
—John Rogers

Without the antagonist, the protagonist has nothing to do, no fight to win, no one to defeat. A protagonist without a worthy antagonist is a hero in search of a story. After all, who would Harry Potter be without Lord Voldemort? Or Cinderella without the Wicked Stepmother? Or Sherlock Holmes without Professor Moriarty?

As Clive Barker likes to say, “A story is only as good as its villain.” As a storyteller, your job is to create a villain readers love to hate. Consider these worthy antagonists:

• Jeanine Matthews in Veronica Roth’s Divergent
• Dr. Julius No in Ian Fleming’s Dr. No
• Cathy Ames in John Steinbeck’s East of Eden
• Captain Black Jack Randall in Diana Gabaldon’s Outlander
• Nurse Ratched in Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
• Hannibal Lecter in Thomas Harris’s Red Dragon
• Mrs. Coulter in Philip Pullman’s The Golden Compass
• Captain Hook in J.M. Barrie’s Peter Pan
• Annie Wilkes in Stephen King’s Misery
• Edward Hyde in Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde

The right villain can sell your story—and the wrong villain can kill the deal. I have a client whose first thriller was excellent, but the villain of the story was an evil child—and an evil child is a hard sell. Several editors refused to even consider the manuscript because the very thought of a bad-seed kid character made them uncomfortable. Those who did review the manuscript loved the writing but also felt that the young age of the villain made the project too risky for today’s tough marketplace.

This story has a happy ending. Undeterred, my client wrote a second novel, this time with an older villain, and I sold it quickly in a two-book deal. (But I may sell that first novel yet. …)

Here’s the lesson: Work as hard on developing your antagonist as you do your protagonist. Make sure she’s at least as smart and strong and complex a character as your hero. Don’t paint her as all bad; give her a human side that will move readers not to just hate her but rather love to hate her.

“A villain must be a thing of power, handled with delicacy and grace. He must be wicked enough to excite our aversion, strong enough to arouse our fear, human enough to awaken some transient gleam of sympathy. We must triumph in his downfall, yet not barbarously nor with contempt, and the close of his career must be in harmony with all its previous development.”
—Agnes Repplier

Speaking Parts

“Each writer is born with a repertory company in his head. Shakespeare has perhaps twenty players. … I have ten or so, and that’s a lot. As you get older, you become more skillful at casting them.”
—Gore Vidal

No protagonist is an island; no protagonist stands alone. The most popular heroes are surrounded by friends and foes, neighbors and acquaintances, lovers and spouses, rivals and relatives. This supporting cast serves a number of important storytelling functions. When they are well drawn and well executed, your secondary characters:

• Create the community in which your protagonist operates. Dorothy lands in Oz, and her new pals the Tin Man, the Scarecrow, and the Cowardly Lion become her community as she tries to make her way to the Wizard.
• Fuel the conflict of your story. Think of Inspector Gamache and the residents of Three Pines, who, one way or another, play into the murder investigations in Louise Penny’s popular Chief Inspector Armand Gamache mystery series.
• Challenge your protagonist’s ideas, assumptions, and morals. Have you read Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl? If you haven’t, then you should. Or at least watch the movie—and see the ultimate gauntlet thrown in the world’s worst marriage.
• Serve as leverage, bait, or victims for the villain, as in the Taken film franchise, in which Liam Neeson plays Bryan Mills, who’s always rescuing his wife and/or daughter.
• Divide your protagonist’s loyalties. This is every cop who must choose between his love of the force, his corrupt fellow cops, and his own integrity—à la Peter Maas’s classic biography, Serpico.
• Reveal your protagonist in love and lust. Examples of this abound—from Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita and E.L. James’s blockbuster Fifty Shades of Grey to practically every character in George R.R. Martin’s A Game of Thrones, with the possible exception of the eunuchs.
• Provide support and loyalty when your hero most needs it. Robert B. Parker gave his private detective Spenser a girlfriend—Susan Silverman—and a colleague—Hawk—who do all this for Spenser and more.
• Betray your hero in the worst possible ways. “Et tu, Brute?” says Caesar to Brutus in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar as the senators descend upon him. Of course, you can turn this around and make Brutus the hero, whose leader, Caesar, has betrayed him and his Roman republic.
• Serve as mirrors for your protagonist. That’s why Elizabeth Bennet has all of those unmarried sisters in Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice; they reflect the limited options available to young women at the time and what can happen when those options work out—or don’t.
• Illuminate your protagonist’s inner and outer lives. Many protagonists are misunderstood; they need a best friend to explain them to others—and to themselves. That’s why Hamlet had his Horatio and Sherlock Holmes his Dr. Watson and Captain Kirk his Mr. Spock.
• Push your protagonist to do things he wouldn’t ordinarily do. The character who challenges the hero to be more, well, heroic, is often his mentor, such as Luke Skywalker’s Obi-Wan in George Lucas’s Star Wars and Cinderella’s Fairy Godmother.
• Provide (much-needed) comic relief. Many sidekicks serve this purpose, most notably Harry Potter’s pal Ron Weasley and Shrek’s Donkey.
• Offer opportunities for new storylines and subplots. This is true of the majority of series, whose success often depends on the creation of a community of secondary characters to provide enough room for the series to grow. Think of Ed McBain’s 87th Precinct series, which set the standard for police procedurals for generations to come.

It Takes a Village

If you’re writing a series—and even if you’re not—you should work hard to create an interesting supporting cast of secondary characters. A good supporting cast can make the difference between selling your work and not—and that’s never been truer than today. Most publishers are looking for projects with series and/or sequel potential—and as we’ve seen, supporting casts are critical to the success of both.

The digital landscape encourages series publishing because it gives publishers the opportunity to build an author’s brand, promote and upsell the author’s backlist, and win new readers with every new entry in the series. I’ve had several clients who thought they’d written stand-alone novels end up with multi-book deals. I even sold one client’s stand-alone thriller as Book One in a multi-book deal, with the understanding that Book Two would lend itself to a series. That’s why I always advise clients to have ideas for subsequent stories waiting in the wings, so when—and it’s almost always when, not if—the editor asks if the project could be a series, we can quickly work up short pitches for those additional books.

From the first book in his best-selling Longmire series, Craig Johnson has surrounded his winning protagonist, Walt Longmire, sheriff of Absaroka County, Wyoming—the least populated county in the least populated state—with a strong supporting cast of characters:

• As with most police procedurals, Walt’s colleagues at the sheriff’s office make up part of his supporting cast: feisty under-sheriff Vic Moretti, receptionist/dispatcher Ruby, and several deputies, including Jim “The Ferg” Ferguson and Turk.
• Walt must also interact with the local officials, including Mayor Steve Brandt; the circuit court judge, Vern Selby; and the prosecuting attorney for the county, Kyle Straub.
• Walt has a grown daughter, Philadelphia lawyer Cady Longmire, and a beloved late wife, Martha, whose death haunts him.
• Dorothy Caldwell runs the Busy Bee restaurant in town, and Ernie Brown runs the local newspaper, the Durant Courant. Both characters serve as sources of information and irritation for Walt.
• Walt’s best friend, Henry Standing Bear, is from the Cheyenne Nation and runs a local watering hole called the Red Pony.
• Walt’s mentor, Lucian Connally, was his predecessor as sheriff.
• The residents and law enforcement officers of the nearby Indian reservation play a key—and sometimes adversarial—role in Walt’s investigations.
• Local ranchers, hunters, tourists, and retirees are other groups with whom Walt must deal on a regular basis—not to mention the Division of Criminal Investigation in Cheyenne, the FBI in Washington, and other assorted law enforcement agencies.

You can see how this supporting cast gives Johnson a lot of room in which to stretch for storylines in his novels.

If you’re writing genre fiction, then this cast of characters becomes even more important. For science fiction and fantasy writers, creating a strong supporting cast is a critical part of world building (which we’ll discuss at length in chapter nine). Readers who prefer police procedurals (and there are millions of them) look forward to getting to know everyone in the precinct, at work, and at home. Women’s fiction, by definition, requires a close look at the heroine’s relationships with colleagues, friends, and family—especially siblings, parents, and children—and lovers as well. (In fact, if you’ve written a novel about sisters or mothers and daughters, I’d like to see it. Now.) Cozy mysteries require a small-town setting full of colorful friends and frenemies, and pets, preferably a dog and a cat. Don’t laugh—I’ve had clients who’ve been asked to add both canines and felines to their novels before the deals were inked.

But no matter what your genre, peopling your work with compelling protagonists, worthy antagonists, and well-rounded secondary characters is key to writing stories that find an audience in today’s tough marketplace.

But that’s just half the battle. Now you have to step on the gas.

“Believe in your character. Animate (or write) with sincerity.”
—Glen Keane