Writing Characters—Why It’s Okay If You Don’t Know Everything About Them
My perspective on writing has changed a lot over the years and one of the aspects that has been impacted the most is the creation of characters. Until about five years ago, I used to spend weeks coming up with lists of backstories, physical traits, preferences and hobbies, fears, motivations, flaws, dreams, values, and so much more for the characters I thought I wanted to bring to life. My main focus back then was to develop characters that felt real and complex, partly because I thought that once I knew what my characters wanted, I’d have a solid reason and the motivation to write their stories. It worked for many writers of fiction I admired, so why not for me, I thought? Many articles and interviews I’d read insisted that you needed to know everything about your characters in order to write a good story.
Those lists of attributes and details proved to be my creative demise. Trying to come up with elaborate backstories for my characters left me disoriented and incredibly bored by them—they felt forced, shallow, unrealistic. There was nothing natural about those fictitious people existing in such a structured form. As people, it takes a lifetime to get to know ourselves, let alone others around us. What is fascinating about our nature is that it shifts and rewrites itself according to what happens to us. What makes fictional characters interesting and worth reading about is not what their favourite colour, dish, or travel destination is (though it matters to know these things if useful for the story), but the relatable and uncertain aspects of their personalities. The charm of wondering about who they are, of finding out along the way, of allowing our characters to materialise when we write about them rather than before, made more sense to me as a writer of fiction.
During my Creative Writing course, I was exposed to a wide literary range and I got to explore the works of many writers who had taken a different, more unconventional if you will, approach to their characters. Writers such as Anna Kavan, Clarice Lispector, Octavia E. Butler, Shirley Jackson, Caitlín. R. Kiernan, J. G. Ballard, M. John Harrison, to name a few, seem to have abandoned the pattern of ‘know who you are writing about.’ Their characters have an almost magical feel to them and can often be perceived as apparitions rather than ‘real’ people. Yes, they still do things and go through numerous changes and life-altering experiences, but they are not there to serve the purpose of relatability—they are vessels for storytelling, not moral/immoral epitomes.
It is by no means wrong to pursue an approach where you get to know every detail about your characters, but writing about characters who are not perfectly polished and well-established might leave a deeper mark on the reader’s unconscious, even if it doesn’t offer the immediate satisfaction of understanding and caring for them.
If you too have been stuck for a long time wondering who you should write about, here are three things to consider (and hopefully to inspire you to break a few boundaries):
Your Characters Don’t Have To Be Real People
If you’re writing fiction, you have the freedom to create any kind of character you want or see fit for your stories. They can have roots in reality and be regular people or they can be otherworldly and powerful in ways science can’t explain. What they don’t have to do, unless that would fit the narrative, is to act and talk and exist like real people. Of course, the inspiration for writing them will mostly come from external sources, but try to allow your imagination to give them unique qualities as well. Don’t be afraid to use archetypes or uncommon traits rather than the duality of good versus bad. It would be overwhelming to read pages filled with conversations and mundane actions that simulate reality, so your characters don’t have to be too true to life either.
In my stories, I always end up recycling my characters and using certain archetypes to create them: mothers, daughters, women who’ve suffered certain emotional or physical abuse, villagers and townsfolk, witches, creatures of the otherworld who come back for reasons I don’t always reveal or even know myself. What changes is how their stories unfold.
It’s Okay Not To Know Everything About Your Characters
Consider making an in-depth list of things that define you, then make others that define your friends and family members. Try to include in these lists strong wishes, moments and memories of trauma, of intense pain and love, of joy, of loss. Now think about what motivates you and the people in your life to exist, to move on, to dream. Are your intentions always good or always bad? Analyse your development, emotional, professional, social. Is it linear? Can you see a pattern that works the same way for all of you? I’ll be presumptuous and answer with ‘no’ to all of these.
Though I said in the previous paragraph that characters don’t have to be entirely relatable and to mirror life in order to be significant to the narrative, I strongly believe that answering the same questions for each character will strip them of their individuality. Not all of them need to have a moral quest or reason to move further; they don’t all have to be memorable or gifted in certain ways. Not all are capable of having clear and concise inner monologues. Information like their date of birth, what their everyday mood is, how they like to dress, what they prefer to eat, if they love animals or not, or (the strangest I’ve read) how was their first ever date, can add substance to your tale only if it brings something vital to the narrative. If you’re not meant to specify these aspects in your story, you’ll most likely not need them.
Rely On Your Intuition
Characters made from scraps, from random mental images, from incoherent thoughts, or from fragments you’ve gathered as a reader yourself can be incredibly powerful and perhaps more convincing than the very defined ones. Going back to the previous point, if you create all your characters as if they’ve undergone thorough interviews prior to entering your story, you might find yourself stuck with characters who are unable to integrate into their surroundings. The less we know and control meticulously about our characters, the more they can accurately express themselves on page.
There is nothing wrong with aiming for clarity and definition in your writing. If you work better by following certain rules of plot, character development, and worldbuilding, you should do what makes writing happen for you, but thinking that there’s only one way will only limit your options. Writing characters as if they were projections of your unconscious rather than creating them from a checklist of unnecessary information can be both beautiful and alarming, and that way your possibilities will expand and your storytelling can only benefit.
