Tag Archives: conflict

Adding Depth To Your Characters

We are attracted to distinction. A character that has depth is a character that has a unique view on life, and–regardless of whether that view parallels or contradicts our own–that intrigues us.

Caveat: As always, I’m speaking about a specific type of character, that deserves the amount of ‘screen time’ I’m proposing. Not necessarily should you do this to everyone in the king’s army; some characters should just be common spear carriers, with no purpose other than filling out a scene.

1) Show us character, don’t tell us!

  • Of course, this is true of nearly all writing, but by characters it is especially imperative. The difficulty of maintaining it continuously–which is unlikely, so don’t expect it–pays back dividends in the effect it has on the reader.
  • Consider these two paragraphs:

Alden didn’t like roses. He knew a lot about them, but they reminded him of his brother, who had just passed away. For others, they might make a good apology, but the memories now made it so they never worked for him, and probably never would.

OR

“I’m sorry.” She was holding out a flower to him, a rose. Rosa santana, he immediately thought, even as he imagined another rose, held by another hand. Red climbing rose. Joey had loved to climb. And now . . . now he never would again.

“No,” Alden said, throat tight. “I’m sorry.” He walked away from her, left her standing alone, holding a bent rose in the rain. It was better than she see the tears that mixed with the water pouring down his cheeks. “I’m so sorry,” he whispered.

Not the best, but I think it gives an idea of what I mean. Notice the “show” version (the bottom one, if you didn’t notice) is significantly longer that simply “telling” the information to the reader. It’s something to keep in mind, but most times the extra words are worth their weight in roses. I mean, gold.

Hint: Dialogue is inherently more “show” than “tell.” It is vivid and has a constant sense of importance and motion that accounts for the many readers that skip paragraphs of description on their search for dialogue sequences. Conveying character through the way they speak (or the way others speak of them) is a great way to add depth to them. Keep in mind, however, that it is possible to write “tell-y” dialogue, an example of which would be Maiden-Butler, etc. (I’ll cover these more in the Dialogue section.)

 

2) Make them care about things other than the plot.

  • Okay, let’s just get this one out of the way: A character’s entire claim to life can’t be LOVE INTEREST. This happens a lot when you need to further the hero’s plot–or add a romantic subplot–and you don’t consider the addition as a character unto themselves. It makes them seem two dimensional and flat–in one word, uninteresting. Make sure that if you have a character of the opposite gender than the MC, they are there for things other than being the love interest–it’ll be well worth it.
  • A character will have much more depth if they have things they love, things they hate, and things they think about, that are not necessarily plot-related. A good way to go about this is to ask yourself before creating a character: What does this character want before the plot begins? What will they want after it ends?

 

3) Make their conflicts distinctive.

  • Characters can often feel flat simply because they remind the reader of other characters in the book. I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: We crave distinction. Characters who struggle with different things–things unique to them and their approach to life–are characters I want to read about. They also show different sides of the story, thereby fleshing it out, rather than hitting upon the same key to spur your characters onwards.
    • As a side note: If a character has a similar conflict to someone else, but reacts differently to it, they will also feel interesting. The trick is to know how often to utilize this without making it seem overused.
  • One thing to point out is that conflict is often a motivation for moving the plot forward. By keeping conflicts distinctive, you are also making sure the characters aren’t copying each other’s motivations, which begins to feel flat really quick. Additionally, having motivations differ between characters allows you to have scenes where all the characters are essentially doing the same thing, yet it’s still interesting, because their reasons for doing it are different. A character that is outgoing in one scene and introverted in another–similar to how people actually are in real life–won’t seem broken if their motivations for both states are the same. In fact, they’ll be all the more interesting for it.

 

There’s one other thing I forgot to mention. Even after you’ve shown that your character is distinctive and cares about things other than the plot–let them be wrong. We make mistakes in life, and a character that never misjudges a person or situation feels fake to us. So let them think their problem is one thing, when in reality it lies somewhere else altogether. Let them use something as motivation, only to discover they were really being motivated by something else. Or someone else. In the end, you’ll have created a person much deeper and more nuanced, a person we will then follow wherever in the story they decide to take us.

Hit ’em Where It Hurts

The last couple of posts have been more about the overall philosophy of writing. This week let’s begin our dive into the nitty-gritty aspects of the craft, starting with plot. We’ll cover the actual methods to plotting in a later post, but for now let’s focus on what it is that makes plot work. In other words, what makes a story interesting?

The answer, of course, is conflict. Conflict is the sole and primary driver of any tale, and it must be continually heightened to maintain reader interest in your story. In Aspects of a Novel, E. M. Forster explains that there is nothing to grasp in the statement, ‘the king died.’ You can improve it to ‘the king died and then the queen died,’ but it still lacks a certain tension. Add an emotional sense of causality, as in, ‘the king died and then the queen died of grief,’ and you have yourself an intriguing plot.

In fact, conflict is the glue that not only binds the reader to the page, but also entwines the separate aspects of your story into a cohesive whole. The three major divisions of a story are Plot, Character, and Setting. These become a completed tale only through the accentuation of the conflict points that connect them. An atheist in a nation of believers provides an immediate Character vs. Setting conflict. A world in which demons terrorize the night, eventually resulting in the death of one of our main characters throws Setting and Plot into conflict. Most importantly, all of these make the story more interesting.

It sounds almost sadistic, but a captivating story is one in which a character desperately wants something, then is systematically denied that thing until the very end (at which time they may still not get it, depending on the story.) This can be explained simply through the famous, “no pain, no gain,” adage. Your character’s victory will only have value if they have to fight through hell to achieve it. In a way, the pain is simply a means to an end, at which time it will finally be appreciated as the true reason for the reader’s emotional satisfaction.

When outlining a plot, creating a character, or building a setting, think about what conflicts they each add to the story. Do the conflicts overlap? Do they each provide opportunities to heighten the tension? Are the stakes high enough that your main characters can’t just walk away from their problems? It is questions like these that will add that extra layer of cohesiveness to both your plot and the novel as a whole.

We’ve explained the crucial role conflict plays in a story, but before we move on to the actual structuring of a plot, there is one other piece to making a plot work (which will be covered in the next post,) namely the concept of promises and their fulfillment.

Happy Fourth of July!