A few weeks ago, I was invited to give a lecture on character development at a writing workshop. I spent a lot of time talking about the “Iceberg Theory” of character development – that the main work involved in developing characters takes place outside of the written page, in the hours and days the author spends imagining the characters in his or her mind. This “below the surface” work is long and arduous and painful. In other words, it is a lot like learning to love another person. Here is an excerpt from that lecture, revised a little, to add some thoughts that came to me since then.
Loving your characters may seem at first like an abstract concept, a concept that authors toss around whose meaning like the word “love” itself has been lost through overuse. But I want to tell you that for me love of a character is real and is more important than any technique we may learn about how to create realistic characters. Love for a character includes many of the qualities of the kind of true, mature love that we experience in real life. On a basic level, to love your character is to like them, to like spending time with them, to find them interesting, to be patient with them and be willing to continue imagining them until they reveal themselves to you completely, until you know them as fully as one can know another, inside and out, body, mind and heart. As in the real world, love increases the more you get to know and understand the other. As in the real world, character love involves a respect for the individuality and autonomy of the other. As in real life, careful listening is needed. Who is this character telling you he or she is? As in life, character love means you will put the interests of the character above your own and you will not treat them as a means to an end. You don’t have sufficient love if your character is simply there to represent an idea or a type or a mental condition or is simply there so you can manipulate the emotions of the reader. Of course characters are only a part of the greater whole which makes up the world of the novel. But to love your character is different from loving your plot or your setting. There is something about loving your character that makes them distinct and independent and that touches you in a way different, more personal, that any other aspect of your novel. Loving your character hurts because it sometimes happens that to love them you first need to love a part of yourself that is embodied in your character. It is love that makes you want to know your character deeply even if you know that what you discover might be painful. It is through love that you discover your character’s uniqueness and in love that you understand and accept that character’s humanity, flaws and all. And finally it is love that guides you in how you present that character to the readers so that they too might share in the understanding and compassion you’ve developed for your character, in your awe at your character’s complex concreteness, in your love.
