Character Development

One of the things that I find most challenging about writing fiction is creating realistic conversations. When you read a story, the author tells you what is going on while you shut up and listen, and he has to make you comfortable with being completely powerless to influence the direction of the narrative. Authors do this by making it seem as if you are an outside listener eavesdropping on two (or more) character’s dialogue, when in reality you are a reader of one person’s monologue.

Making it appear that two people are interacting with one another while I am one person essentially talking to myself is exactly as hard as it sounds. I have one identity, precisely one scope of experience. Granted, I have had a moderately full and interesting life up to this point, but for every one aspect of life that I have suffered or enjoyed, there are thousands that I have missed out on. I can never know what it is like to be black, to be a woman, to be a West Virginian coal miner in the 1870’s that just lost his best friend to union violence. I have to imagine what those things would be like, and that takes a lot of work.

Creating a whole new imaginary psyche and crawling inside isn’t the hard part, though. The hard part comes when I create two imaginary psyches and jump from head to head as they converse with one another. I must constantly remind myself that person A is not person B. She does not have the same history, priorities, or reactions as her counterpart and neither of them have the same identities as me, the author. They are not necessarily interested in the same things that I am interested in, so they are forever wandering off to places that I did not plan for them to go.

I know. Technically I am the author, the puppet master, the veritable god of the literary universe that I create. My characters can do nothing without my consent, nay, without my command. However, my power trip gets rudely delayed when I realize that I am here to serve you, the reader, thus my characters are also here to serve you by proxy. This is your story, and you want to feel as if the people populating it are unique, vibrant, thinking individuals instead of the automatons that they are, so I have to give my utmost in creating a believable illusion. Besides, I am happy to let my characters do what they want, so long as it keeps the plot moving. The hardest part of writing is also the most fun part; characters telling a story better than the one I had dreamed up.