Sarah Cotchaleovitch

May 6, 2016

Once upon a time, there was a well-adjusted girl who played well with others and made straight A’s all through school. She earned a full scholarship to an Ivy League university, finished her Master’s degree by the age of 24, married a successful neurosurgeon, and gave her parents three beautiful, well-adjusted grandchildren. She and her husband had a long, happy marriage, living well into their 90s, and they died peacefully in their sleep.

While most parents and teachers would love to have a child like the well-adjusted girl – and many people would be thrilled to have their lives end up like this – it makes for a yawner of a story. Yet you might be surprised how many authors think that this is exactly the kind of prose that audiences want to read.

Everyone – even the most boring of us – has a story. As the mother of a well-adjusted child, I can attest that there are still struggles. Normal ones, like surviving colic and potty training, to the surprising discovery that the son who was well developed socially couldn’t learn his letters. By the time he was six, we had an answer: dyslexia. Now, if I added this one little detail to my story above, the well-adjusted child’s story would suddenly be much more interesting. Other puzzled parents of children who almost seemed to have it all could relate. They’d want details. How did she earn her Master’s degree so quickly? How did she overcome the obstacles that come with a differently wired brain?

If every real person has a story, don’t we owe as much to the characters that we writers create? It doesn’t have to be bleak and hopeless. It doesn’t have to be colored with despair from one end to the other in order to avoid a sickly sweet ending. And why? Well, because life isn’t like this, and although writers can get away with it for a while, readers will eventually turn mutinous if they have to stretch their disbelief to the breaking point.

To start with, think of the people you love in your life – or even the people who exasperate you. When I was middle school-aged, I would come up with every excuse in the book not to go with my parents to the grocery store. I mean, what if I ran into someone I knew at the exact moment that they decided to sing along with the store’s Muzak? While that kind of thing doesn’t bother me nowadays (in fact, I’ve become that parent), it’s a tiny detail that makes my parents my parents instead of any other mom/dad combo. If I were looking to recreate parents of teens in a story, I might even steal that attribute to add dimension.

How many of your favorite characters, when you get down to it, resemble real people? The example I’ll use (because it’s pretty universal, and most people will understand, even if they haven’t read the books) is Harry Potter. At the beginning of J.K. Rowling’s seven-book series, Harry is soon to be 11, and the books carry us through Harry’s teen years. J.K. Rowling wasn’t scared to share the less pleasant side of teendom. The book that’s always the most difficult for me to get through is The Order of the Phoenix – and not because it’s the longest. Rather, 15-year-old Harry knows better than anyone else (especially adults) what he should do with his life. He acts, like his best friend Ron Weasley would say, like a moody, arrogant git throughout the entire book. He makes stupid decisions. He frustrates readers for 800-plus pages. Rowling could have made us a lot happier by making him nicer, less impulsive – less a 15-year-old boy. But instead, she chose to do the hard, necessary thing; she made him real.

If you’ve ever heard of tension, it often has to do with plot, but I’m here to attest that it has a lot to do with characters, too. There can be tension between families (take the Capulets and Montague’s in Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet), or it can be tension within a character. I can’t tell you how many times I fight with myself over my impatience, my OCD, even my sweet tooth. And those are very small things, yet qualities like that that should be present in every character.

Give me a character that will make me mad, make me care, make me wonder why I care, and who – in the end – lives a story that is interesting enough for me to want read. Otherwise, why bother introducing that character in the first place?

In case you’re still not convinced, do me a favor: read Bess Streeter Aldrich’s Song of Years. It’s an old book, what I consider a pioneer novel, but it’s well worth the read. I won’t spoil a thing when I say that the book opens with a gravestone, on which is carved the inscription:

SUZANNE
BELOVED WIFE
OF

The gravestone has been there so long that the rest of the words are obscured by overgrown vegetation. So we know that Suzanne died a long time ago, but it also seems that she had a happy ending.

But we don’t know how she got there. What did she do to deserve the love of… whomever? And as we meet Suzanne, the youngest child of nine (and six of her eight siblings are sisters), we live part of her American Civil War-era life with her.

Wait – no cars or iPads or TV? How could this story possibly relate to someone of the 21st century? Because Suzanne is human and faces many of the struggles that the rest of us humans face every day – like how to stand out among so many siblings – we forget the differences because we can relate to her as a person, feel for her as she makes difficult choices like every person has to make.

Suzanne was not cut out from a cookie cutter, and neither are my favorite characters – or my favorite real people. That’s not to say that we have nothing in common, but we all have a past or  an inner struggle or a great, unrequited love – something – that sets us apart. Breathe life into your characters by making them conflicted, strange, endearing. Make their lives matter, whether they endure for the space of 100 words or 100,000.

Make them real.