A Specific Sorrow: The Key to Authentic Characters

About a month ago, I attended Story Embers’ Authentic Character Summit. The event started out with a bang as the opening keynote was given by one of my favorite speakers: Tosca Lee.

Tosca has a way of instilling what I would call an audacious passion for storytelling in me. Her pre-conference workshop at Realm Makers 2018 was unforgettable; I still use her character creation exercise whenever I get stuck with my own characters. I wasn’t surprised when I felt the same energy, desire, and fearlessness as before when I listened to her at the Summit. I won’t go into the specifics of what she said (you can purchase a recording of her keynote here!) since it was the general theme she addressed which really captured my mind and heart.

How do we honestly portray the full human experience? How do we write characters so authentically that the reader believes they have a soul—and relates to it?

After thinking over what I heard at the Summit, I would argue that the most important element of honest, skillful character creation and portrayal is specificity.

 

The Specific is Universal

Stories cannot be about everyone and everything. Trust me, I have tried to do this with a plot—I tried to make it a political maneuvering plot, and a military strategy plot, and a spy-mission plot, and a journey and adventure plot. My story was a mess. Thankfully, we have subplots which help add some different flavoring to our stories, but in general, the main plot is going to be about one main thing.

The same goes for characters. Your character cannot be everyone. While well-crafted characters have dichotomies and paradoxes and surprises in their personality, they are still one person. They are not the other guy or girl who is their sidekick. They are themselves.

Take an example from two stories:

Story A: a person saw a house burn down. The person became sad.

Is there any emotion in that story? Do you feel sorry for ‘a person?’ Maybe a little. I’ll bet you’re not in tears. Try this:

Story B: After college, Susan moved into the house next door to her childhood home. She waited ten years for the current owner to move away or sell that house. Finally, the day came when the for-sale sign was up. Susan put in an offer and was accepted. She was overjoyed. The night before she was to move in, she could hardly sleep. Then, she smelled smoke coming in through her bedroom window. The house—her home—was in flames, and nothing but ashes was left by the next morning. Susan fell to her knees and wept, the stage for her childhood joys now the ground that swallowed her tears.

That story may not have you sobbing, but, despite my extensive use of telling, it has something more. Now, it’s not just ‘a person’ in the story. It’s Susan. She (implicitly) misses her childhood home, and she’s willing to wait to get it back. The house is not ‘a house.’ It is her home. She grew up there. So when it burns down, we as readers have the ability to feel truly sorrowful about it, not just in an intellectual way, but in an emotional way.

Sorrow is unbelievable to readers if it is simply sorrow. That’s because we don’t know sorrow by itself, in a general, abstract way. When we first experience sorrow as children, it is not simply ‘sorrow.’ It is sorrow about something or because of something very specific. We can only know sorrow as our sorrow, in our circumstances, in ways we have felt sorrow.

Does that mean connecting a reader to a story is impossible? After all: the author likely does not know the reader’s exact sorrow or joy or emotion in their specific circumstance. Sometimes they’ll get lucky and readers will be wondering, “How did they know I felt this because of that?” But most of the time that doesn’t happen.

Yet, here’s the odd and wonderful thing: despite how we all do not know sorrow in the same way, we still all know sorrow. We know the emotion, even if we haven’t felt it in a way anyone else has.

A paradox is the result: the more specific a character’s sorrow is, the more we can relate to it, because we only know specific sorrow ourselves. A character’s general sorrow will not move us like a character’s specific sorrow.

This applies to more than just emotions. It applies to hopes and dreams, fears and flaws, relationships and experiences. If it is specific, there is a greater chance of it being universal—of it being something a reader can relate to.

Of course, there are (like many things) exceptions. Everyman characters are still good characters. There are some circumstances that some people may have a harder time relating to than others (that’s why knowing your target audience is key). But, while I’ve never stumbled through Mordor with the One Ring dragging me down, I have stumbled through my own trials with some burden dragging me down… and my heart goes out to Frodo.

 

Searching the Terrain

What does this mean for writers? How do we apply this to our stories?

It means that we are given the simple yet difficult task of being specific in the creation and portrayal of our characters.

And boy is this hard.

In theory, it’s easy, but our brains can be lazy. Slap a few unique quirks on a character, give him a goal, and bam! A specific, unique character, right?

Probably not. Unless you’re exceedingly lucky, it takes a lot more prodding and poking (and digging and mining) to get a truly authentic, unique, specific character.

There are dozens of books written on this by people a lot more knowledgeable and experienced than I am, but from the writing I have done, I’ve come back again and again to one technique.

Use yourself.

You are the  most real person you know. If anyone you know knows what it’s like to be human, it’s you. You are the one who best knows what it’s like to have your reason tell you it should be one way, but your emotions (and maybe even the other side of your reason…) demand that it be another. You are the one who best knows what loneliness in the middle of a crowd feels like, what the consistency of crushed dreams is, and what medicine can best soothe a homesick heart.

No, you’re likely not an expert on human nature (who is?). But precisely because you’ve felt these things and experienced them yourself, you’ll know how to put them into a character and onto a page. You know what specific human emotions, thoughts, and experiences feel like.

But here comes the hard part: actually knowing these feelings and experiences. It requires you to be wide awake to life, perhaps more awake than you’d like to be, so it’s as though you’re forcing your eyes to be stretched wide as you gaze into direct sunlight. It requires you go to exploring the terrain of your heart, looking for some joy or pain to remember that can put the spark of life into your character. And that brings you face to face with your own dragons, so you go fighting your own dragons just so you can accurately describe what it’s like for your character to fight his dragons. Writers like to experience everything themselves.

Then, once you’ve found that joy or sorrow, dream or experience that you give your character, you have to incarnate it on a page. Which, once you put the whole character arc in there, is a lot like trying to incarnate sin and redemption onto a page.

So… you need a lot of prayer and a lot of grace. But God is using what you love to do to make you a better vessel of that grace and a better prayer-er, so it all turns out well in the end, right? 😉

 

In sum: your readers are not God. They cannot feel all the sorrows and joys and emotions of the human race at once. They can only feel a handful, one at a time, in each character. Writers have to invite readers into compassion (literally ‘co-passion’) with the Passion of your character. The more specific that Passion is, the more readers will feel it, and the more they’ll be impacted by it.

Then, of course, don’t forget the Resurrection after the Passion!

God bless!

K.M.

 

What do you think is the best trick for creating authentic characters?