Small aside: I've noticed that on the livejournal feed for this blog the link near the bottom of this article is messing up the HTML. There's nothing wrong with the HTML on this end, so I can't fix it. Sorry.
Fiction involves a certain amount of suspension of disbelief as a part of its very nature. We cut out all the ums and ahs of real conversation, unless they illustrate a character’s indecision and uncertainty, along with all the repetition you get from real people – further to that, when was the last time you read a book where it showed you that the character went to the bathroom anywhere near as often as is humanly necessary, or even (most often, and with good reason) at all? I think we can all agree that we don’t really want to read about every potty break, every time somebody felt it necessary to repeat themselves ad infinitum for no reason, each individual falling asleep and waking up the next day.
But that can be taken too far, and nowhere so much as in character design. How many people do you know who are truly, from every hair on their heads to everything they do, absolutely perfect? Not a single flaw? Nobody, of course, and that’s probably a good thing, because admit it, they would be absolutely nauseating. So why do so many writers feel it necessary to make their characters so perfect that it’s impossible to suspend our disbelief, when we’re so prepared to do it?
There’s a term for it in fandom – Mary Sue, or Gary Stu, fiction. The author has written the character she would want to be in the story, and so of course she is wonderful in every way. Everybody loves Mary Sue, passionately and without reservation, and not only is she the most powerful in all the land she is also the most beautiful. Is there no limit to her perfection? She never puts a foot wrong, never says the wrong thing, never gets a spot on her alabaster skin. It’s sickening. On top of that, she usually has a ridiculously overblown name, like Rainbow Blossom, or Aramantha Felicity Softfeather. All in all, it’s the ultimate turn-off, and back-buttons are hit on browsers all over the internet. The only difference with books is that you can, in fact, burn them and get the visceral pleasure of seeing the horror inflicted on you turned back on the book, as well as taking out the wasted £5.99 from its paperback hide.
Believable characters have flaws, both physical and personal. Maybe his nose is a little crooked, or her belly a little soft. Even making somebody short can be enough, sometimes. I’m not saying make your characters hideous, but make them feasible. My main character in my WIP, Halley, is has a lot of self-confidence and trust issues, to the point of a fault. She’s pretty but not gorgeous – her figure is average, her hair is brown instead of platinum blonde.
That’s an important point, by the way. I’ve deliberately chosen for her to be a brunette, not because brunette is unattractive – far from it, and I’m brunette myself – but because it’s the second most common hair colour in humans after black. Some writers will have a million and one redheads, and it’s just not that common a hair colour outside of the Weasley family tree. (In fact, it’s the least common colour of all.) After a while it stops being a way to differentiate a character and starts being OTT. The same can be applied to eyes, though less so. Unless, of course, you give your character purple eyes for no good reason. If you’ve got a reason – it marks them as a Mage, maybe, or it’s a distinguishing feature of the royal family – fine, that’s great, go ahead. But don’t do it ‘just because’.
One of my favourite book series, “Resenting the Hero” and “The Hero Strikes Back” by Moira J. Moore, has a main character who has red hair, but is neither curvy nor petite, so in fact has a very average and not-terribly-remarkable figure, and describes herself as needing a lot of work to make herself worth looking at. Admittedly this is from first-person, so we can assume she might not be totally correct, but the point is that she has chosen a description that works to make us believe her as a real person. It doesn’t extend to her super-hot hero, of course, but there’s a reason he’s that hot, so it works.
Personality-wise, everyone has something wrong with them, as it were. Maybe the character is obsessive-compulsive, or always says the wrong thing, or is prejudiced against one thing or another. Just give them something to make them real, to make them sympathetic, because somebody who’s perfect most definitely isn’t.
Gail Gaymer Martin has done some very good posts over on her blog lately about character design. It’s worth checking out here, anyway – she gives some very good advice.
The best thing you can do when creating characters is to think about them. What makes them tick, what makes them real people. How would they react to various situations? If you’re the sort of person who finds that writing exercises help you to understand people and situations in your work better, try thinking of some really stressful scenarios and writing them out with your characters. How do they behave? Where do they go wrong, and where do they triumph over their own faults? And how damn good do they look in the mirror, without having been sculpted by a plastic surgeon (I would assume? Okay, though, here’s a random factoid for you from one of my lecturers – plastic surgery always leaves scars. Always. It’s just that the really good surgeons know how to hide them – under your eyebrow, in your armpit, etc. So don’t go relying on plastic surgery for a plotline unless you’ve got some futuristic face-changing tech. For facelifts? They cut your skin at the hairline, peel your face half off and do the surgery, then reattach it, so that the scar is hidden in your hair. I’m not even kidding. Creepy much? I think you get my point.)
The more believable the character, the more believable the story is, as a general rule. Why make things difficult for yourself from the get-go when you don’t have to?
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