The enlightened writer understands that plot and character, at their most effective, are separate yet interdependent essences, both driven by story physics. Plot is the stage upon which character is allowed to unfold, where dramatic tension is launched, escalated through pace, and ultimately resolved. Character is the means by which plot becomes relevant and meaningful, the realm of empathy and vicarious experience.
The search for optimal story physics seeks to create harmony and balance across these two critical story elements, without a myopic focus on either.
If you can grasp the nuance of subtext and inner dialogue, if your concept becomes a tension-driven stage upon which this plays, then you’ll have the chops to make your characters more vivid and visceral than you thought possible. Characters are almost always more interesting and transparent when they’re doing something, rather than thinking about something or waxing eloquent in a vacuum. Or worse, being written about.
Just look deeper at your life and relationships and you’ll notice all manner of dialogue going on everywhere. People are constantly engaged in conversations with their most deeply hidden, most despised, and most coveted inner selves. The “self” that is actually in charge is usually up for debate, and in our fiction, that’s the fun of it. It’s not a verbal thing, per se: Folks aren’t going around muttering quietly to themselves, nor should your characters, unless that’s part of their deal.
Often there is a very clear, sometimes palpable gap between one’s inner thoughts and his exterior behavior and attitude. That gap is something most people are dealing with right beneath the surface, sometimes 24-7.
The shy person who must contrive an air of confidence and warmth in a crowd.
The insecure person who walks through the world with a cloak of bluster.
The person who conforms to fit in, even when he realizes this isn’t who he is.
The person faking it in a marriage. At work. In church.
The self-absorbed person sitting with friends at dinner in a nice restaurant, uttering not a single word, totally checked out or waiting until the conversation circles around to his favorite topic—himself.
The seething person hiding hate, resentment, bitterness, and fear behind a mask of calm.
Moods, both good and bad, are part of an inner dialogue. But sometimes the inner noise isn’t obvious.
The extent to which someone—including your hero and your villain—recognizes the gap between her true thoughts, beliefs, preferences, and comfort zones, and the way she chooses to behave or appear in spite of them … is inner dialogue. A constant tug-of-war within the psyche. A devil on one shoulder, an angel on the other. Or at least, the voice of reason, whose hat is borrowed from either of the former.
Inner dialogue is also something readers will relate to, and when they can relate, it jacks the element of empathy.
If a character has no idea how conflicted he or she is, well, that’s a dialogue of another sort. The person can’t see it, though everybody else can. Don’t kid yourself, though, most of us (even those who aren’t in therapy) usually know. The façade, or the vacancy, is a choice.
Before you square off with this dramatic can of worms, think about it. Go through a roster of people you know, and suddenly you’ll realize how transparent the wall behind which this inner dialogue plays can be. The better you know the person, the more aware you are of what’s going on inside him.
He thinks he’s fooling everybody … but not so much.
Scary, isn’t it?
Chances are that, because you are human, you are among these inner conversationalists. All the better to put this to use in your fiction.
Now imagine you’re casting this person—or you—in your story. Consider the possibilities of revealing that inner tension, the inherent contradiction as narrated by an inner dialogue, in a dramatic moment.
Walking into a crowded room. Lying about what you did last night. Asking a girl out for the first time. Feigning joy while considering suicide.
This faux existence is too often the human experience. When depicted artfully in your story, it will evoke empathy from readers on both sides of the hero-villain proposition. In recognizing this, you now have another arrow in your quiver of character-building weapons. Go as deep as you like, picking your moments to maximize revelation, tension, and complexity.
First-person narrative invites this, but you can pull it off in third person, too. Start to look for inner dialogue and character layering in the work of folks like Stephen King, Dennis Lehane, Jonathan Franzen, John Irving, and probably your favorite writer.
Heroes are obvious candidates for inner dialogue. But if you can bring this complexity to your antagonists, as well—who may or may not be human, so write accordingly—you’ll have achieved a new level of depth there, too. This depth will set your story apart.
Just like a writer’s discovery of story architecture (for some, an epiphany), the sudden recognition and understanding of what you’re seeing on the inside of your characters, and how that relates to what they do on the outside, can change everything about your ability to write compelling characters.
This is huge. Get ready to go to the next level the moment this sinks in.
This is as much about recognizing and verbalizing the essence of something that resists description as it is about leaving it to literary instinct or experiential happenstance. The same case can be made for structure and, perhaps, the story physics that drive it.
The nuances of characterization cannot be fully appreciated until one first grasps the fundamentals, which are unto themselves eternally challenging. You can’t negotiate the order of that evolution.
In my previous writing book I described several basic facets of characterization technique: backstory, inner conflict versus exterior conflict, character arc, the three dimensions of characterization (infused with much subtlety and nuance), the seven realms of characterization … all within the context of a journey, quest, or need that is thrust upon the hero by the author. The latter, by the way, is the “give your character something to do” part, the stage upon which character shows itself.
That’s Character 101, a class from which we should never consider ourselves graduated. But where compelling character excellence is concerned, you must dig deeper. Like concept, it’s best to begin crafting character with something compelling in mind.
The most compelling way to suck us into a story and have us immediately understand and root for a character (or hate her, your call), the best way to give your story a shot at huge success, is to show us how the character feels about and responds to the journey you’ve set before her.
This means character surfaces in the here and now, and along the path to come. This is the hero’s humanity, for better or worse: her opinions, fears, feelings, judgments, and inner response to the moment. Too often writers depend on backstory to show character landscape, but that’s only one opportunity. The more effective window into character is having her act out and respond.
And that goes far beyond showing us what she says and does.
The writer who commands this advanced technique of characterization isn’t just showing us what happens. He’s allowing us into the head of the character as it happens, and in a way that allows us to interpret (or misinterpret), emotionally respond to, assess, fear, plan against, flee from, or otherwise form opinions about all that is being processed in a given moment or situation.
This is, at a simplistic level, called point of view. This is where the power of hero empathy kicks in.
But it is an informed point of view, because we are made aware of how the world in any given moment feels and how it is interpreted by the character. And in doing so, we immediately empathize.
The key word here is interpreted. It’s beyond simple characterization. It’s mind-melding the hero with the reader from an emotional, analytical, and sociological point of view.
When done well, it’s the magic pill of characterization. Empathy, leading to rooting, is the most empowering thing a writer can achieve in the relationship between hero and reader.
It is the whole point.