It’s All Character
It’s the absolute favorite word in storytelling. And the one least understood.
Ask writers or fans “Which is more important, characters or—” and you don’t even have to finish the sentence. People will answer “characters!”, eagerly, fiercely, and they’ll reference everyone from Samwise Gamgee to Hamlet.
But, what makes a good character?
My thought is: everything in the story, including parts that aren’t character at all.
Pieces of People
Are characters made by depth, by the sheer number of layers they have? Sometimes.
There’s a marvelous moment in Better Call Saul, where shifty lawyer Jimmy McGill confronts the mentor he’s always admired and resented for judging him so harshly. He offers to give up being a lawyer in exchange for one favor, and when his mentor warns that that would be coercion, he says “So coerce me! We both get what we want!” And we realize Jimmy really would be satisfied—besides getting his wish he’d finally make his mentor happy, and he’d prove to himself that that one unbending person actually will get down in the mud like himself when there’s enough at stake. (It’s inevitable, but a bit disappointing, that said mentor doesn’t budge from his high horse.) It’s a beautiful mix of different motivations all tangling together, and it’s only one moment.
Or it might be less the number of changes and layers a character has than facing the right changes for the story. Frodo is an appealing hero in Lord of the Rings, but he might come off as a bit ordinary if he’d shuffled all the way through his quest instead of proving at the last moment that he had only so much strength. Or if he’d gone home happy without doing justice to all the wounds from his ordeal. That side of the War of the Ring does so much to make it more than an epic for epic’s sake, and makes Frodo a deserving center for it. Even though it’s only a few uncompromising choices in the course of the story.
Sometimes it’s just how well characterization is shown. We all know a few stories where someone goes through a fairly simple journey, but their pain or love or rage comes off so fiercely we’re left shaking. Execution matters too.
Or it could be a tiny point, anything that just clicks with a reader. I’ve seen a smart, lonely orphan boy written as doing coin tricks on his knuckles and yelled “Yes! Of course that’s how he’s spent those years!” It could be a passing reference to what school someone went to that just seems right, or (this is one of my own that stuck with me) watching a man with a flying belt flinch as he’s being led underground. Of course that can be a reward for making everything about the character authentic, so nothing breaks the spell and every touch has more chances to catch the reader with how it fits.
Or sometimes a character shines from just being connected to quality storytelling, even more than the character himself provides. Nobody says Raiders of the Lost Ark was “saved” by Harrison Ford’s swagger; the movie’s real strength is outstanding action and adventure, and Ford’s performance simply added (plenty) to that. Indiana Jones is remembered as a superb action character, but in the end it would be more accurate to say he’s the hero in the ultimate adventure.
What makes a good character? Anything good.
For the Writer, for the Reader
So what does that mean for understanding a story?
A tale is what it is. It’s its own balance of character history, buildup, number of plot twists, and number of characters to play off each other.
Sometimes taking the space for a change that really goes to the heart of a character comes at the expense of being around other people that can explore aspects of what he’s going through. It might be the only way to make a point is how someone doesn’t say what would be obvious, because they simply never would. Or a story needs time to bring a fight or some tinkering to life, enough that we can appreciate the challenges he’s caught between.
All of it helps.
To me, “character” is a running count of how the whole story and backstory have worked to reshape each person, based on how each was different to begin with. “Plot” might be an abstract sense of one event at a time and its momentum, but “character” is the total effect of all the layers they’ve given someone, including that driving sense of what they might do next to break out of the box or crumble inside it. And it’s also how we feel we’d know how they’d live when the story ends, or if we met them in real life.
In the end, that may be the biggest distinction between the two. A story’s plot may leave implications – a claim that the more something like that happened again, the more history might repeat itself. Ambitions, lies, friendships, conspiracies and dreams might all line up the same way, yes.
But since we’re people, we remember the people who walked us through that lesson. Even the times when it wasn’t the characters who brought it to life.
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