Do You Know Your Protagonist? Let's Talk Character Development.

Lesson 2 of "How to Finally Get Started on that Novel"

Mariam Chagelishvili

Lesson 2 of 8 from “How to Finally Get Started on that Novel”

If you think about your favorite novel, you’ll probably remember whatever unforgettable character from said book you connected with most. How many of us have had imaginary affairs with Jane Austen’s relentlessly problematic Mr Darcy, or thought we totally identified with J.D. Salinger’s Holden Caulfield until we reread as adults and retroactively cringed? What these vivid characters have in common is that they are complex, with more than one personality trait, because what’s interesting about a flat, one-note character? Something else they have in common is that their secrets drive the narrative. 

Creating a character who seems to have a life off the page is one of the trickiest and yet most crucial parts of writing a novel. Sure, some novelists traffic in autofiction, using varying degrees of autobiography in their fiction. But the work is the same: you must convince the reader to care about these people.

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Characters and their secrets

Let’s start with the protagonist. Yes, some novels have several main characters or even various narrators. But think about whose story this is. (And please, don’t try to pull a Great Gatsby – yes, I know, it’s narrated by a watchful guy who is barely a character – unless you really have a good reason to tell the story that way, and exquisite narrative control. Gatsby has been Gatsbied already, do your own thing.) 

As I mentioned in the last lesson, your character has to want something. You should know what this is, even if they themselves do not. Like, let’s say you have a character who is really obsessed with finding a date for their best friend’s wedding. (Very “first thought” I know but it’s just an example.) Okay so they might think what they really want is a date, but as the author, you know that what they really want is to seem like they have their life in order, to feel that they have their life in order, to know, perhaps, what love is.

It also helps if your character has a secret. Sometimes this is an actual secret (like the illicit locus of Gatsby’s ill-begotten riches, although didn’t I say we weren’t talking about Gatsby?). In contemporary fiction, this is most often a hidden fear or desire, which will be revealed in a moment of stress. You want your reader to feel that they know the character, but also that there is more to find out – much like when you’re getting to know an actual person in real life.

Charles Baxter writes about character and story shape in the essay “Counterpointed Characterization,” from his great collection Burning Down the House: Essays on Fiction. He notes that the mechanism for revealing what our protagonist is made of isn’t always about facing a bad guy, per se: 

Many good stories have no antagonist at all… Stories often arise when two characters who hardly belong together are forced to inhabit the same frame of reference, as they often must in families.

Perhaps you have noticed that in talking about character, we are almost never talking about a static snapshot. A character sketch of a person, as if they exist in a vacuum, is not the most helpful tool when it comes to spinning up a whole novel. Because the entire point, generally, is some sort of movement, the relationships between the characters. No man is an island, right? Most novels are going to be about people in relation to other people. So even more useful than knowing that your protagonist is a “pert strawberry-blonde,” for example, is knowing how she will respond when she finds a clue in an old clock.

A Study in Character: The Sisters Brothers

The example I’ll use for this lesson is The Sisters Brothers, a 2011 novel by Patrick DeWitt. (n.b. This is one of those magical novels that pleases everyone who reads it; I know that’s a crazy claim but I have found it to be true.) 

In this novel, we have brothers Eli and Charlie Sisters, assassins-for-hire in the Old West – truly one of Baxter’s mismatched pairs. And yet the title is deceiving (just as Mrs. Dalloway is really about both Mrs. Dalloway and Septimus Smith), as it’s really Eli’s story. For one thing, he narrates the book, so we get everything from his point of view. But also, he is the character who really grows and changes throughout the book. 

What’s more, while Charlie is kind of an entertaining brute, Eli is a complex character, full of interesting contradictions that stem from and inform his main internal conflict: his job is murder, but he’s essentially a gentle man who wants to be good. 

We get hints of this right from the start,  as he muses in the first few pages about his horse, Tub: “I was often forced to whip him, which some men do not mind doing and which in face some enjoy doing, but which I did not like to do; and afterward he, Tub, believed me cruel and thought to himself, Sad life, sad life.” Some Old West gunslinger we have here, so worried about the interiority of a broken-down horse who is making his life difficult! 

While Eli has many quirks, traits, and flaws, they all feel organic to who he is. Nothing feels random. They all stem from his secret desire, which is to give up a life of crime and do good. 

For example, he cleans his teeth, an act everyone around him finds ridiculous. This is a fun/horrifying reminder of what life and personal hygiene used to be like, but it’s not there just for laughs or set-dressing – Eli wants to be good, he wants to improve himself, and this is one way this shows up. Eventually he will have to make a high-stakes decision – whether or not to continue this bloody work with his brother – and that is when we will get to see what he is truly made of. 

A couple things to note. We only get a physical description of Eli when it’s relevant. He notes at one point that he’s a big, rough-looking guy, and so someone he’s encountered might be afraid. The physical traits of a character might be a good place to start. After all, we live in our bodies, and our looks, sizes, abilities, personal style, etc, affect how other people treat us and how we experience our lives. 

But this isn’t enough. You should also know what makes your character tick.

I often think about a New Yorker profile from ages ago, about the playwright Edward Albee. His process is described thus:

If Albee feels that an idea is approaching maturity, he will test it: he will go for a long walk, often on the beach, and introduce his characters to a situation that is not part of the play. If they behave easily and naturally—if he is able to improvise dialogue for them without effort—then he will decide that he and they know each other well enough, and he will start to write.

I love this idea of talking to one’s characters to test them for ripeness. And I also tend to wait until I feel like the characters are talking to me before I really get going with a project. It’s simply really hard to write a novel if you don’t know your characters. 

If you’re still just inching up to your character, here a couple of exercises that might help you envision them more clearly:

1. Make a list of everything that is in your character’s backpack/purse/pockets/glove box. Is she the kind of person whose tote bag is full of empy gum wrappers? Is she the kind of person who would never carry a bag, opting for a carabiner of keys? Is she the kind of person who has everything anyone could possibly need stowed tidily in the sections of her complex LeSportsac? You need to know.

2. Answer the Proust questionnaire for your character. 

3. Write a diary entry from the POV of your character. Have them write down the things they don’t want anyone to know. I think this is useful even if – especially if – they aren’t the narrator. You still need to know their voice.

Questions or super exciting revelations to share?

Up Next (Monday Nov 11) → Voice! What is the voice of the book? This might be related to your style as a writer. But it might be different. We will see on Monday.

Amy Shearn is the author of five novels, including the forthcoming Animal Instinct, a queer exploration of divorce, sex, and surviving the pandemic. She works 1:1 with writers, teaches for the educational cooperative Writing Co-Lab and elsewhere, and writes a monthly newsletter called How to Get Unstuck.