The 5-Button Cheat Code to Unforgettable Characters
The not-so-secret formula for creating characters that leap off the page
What is the hardest part of writing fiction?
I’ve asked this question before, and there are many answers. Some writers have a hard time with keeping their plots consistent and logical. Some have trouble with pacing. Other haven’t really gotten the hang of theme and messaging.
But the number one struggle I hear about again and again is creating authentic and believable characters.
I mean, you’re trying to use static words on a page to simulate living, breathing human beings and have them act out a meaningful series of events that creates and then transmits a specific meaning to an audience. Most novice authors (and even some experienced ones) struggle at just that first step up there: believable? authentic?
How even?
Good news: help is available!
A large part of David Corbett’s The Art of Character is dedicated to what he terms the five cornerstones of dramatic characterisation. Think of these as five elements that, when used competently by an author, can help your characters really pop.
These five aspects are:
Desires
Conflict
Vulnerabilities
Secrets
Contradictions
We’ll consider them each in turn, starting with arguably the most crucial one.
Desires
Wants, needs and ambitions—these are the crème de la crème of characterisation, the cornerstone of cornerstones. If you could only pick one of these 5 elements with which to create a character and were forced to chuck out the rest, desire is the one you keep.
A fictional character who doesn’t want anything isn’t a character so much as a concept.
Desire is the bedrock of motive, of drive, of agency—that is, it’s the source of pretty much everything that makes a character seem alive.
If you don’t want anything, there’s no reason for you to move. Characters that don’t move cannot be used to tell a story.
It’s that simple.
Desires are more critical to consider in protagonists, antagonists and main characters, but even secondary characters can benefit from putting some thought into what it is they want in life, even if the answer won’t directly affect the course of the story. Wants and needs can provide the spark that takes a less important character from a flat and lifeless cog to a living, breathing part of the tale. Some of the best moments in fiction come from secondary characters who are dynamic and forceful—think of Angelina Jolie in Girl Interrupted (for which she won an Academy Award), and Robert Downey Jr.’s Lewis Strauss in Oppenheimer.
Speaking of the Oscars, why else do you suppose there are two whole Academy Awards categories for supporting roles? They really are that important to telling great stories.
And here’s a neat trick: as soon as you grant a character a strong, solid, durable desire, you tend to conjure up the second of the five cornerstones as if by magic.
Conflict
The moment a character (or, let’s be real, an actual human being) admits to a desire for something, obstacles automatically arise to oppose that desire.
By giving the character a deep-seated need or want, you automatically put her at odds with something or someone, for the world is not designed to gratify our desires.
— David Corbett, The Art of Character
It is not the experience of the average person that things just tend to fall into his or her lap. There is an innate understanding, imprinted on the nature of reality, that to obtain Thing A (let’s say, a good education, or a nice car, or someone’s hand in marriage), you will have to pay for it somehow. Either you will have to give up Thing B (a ghastly sum of money, or a number of hours of your time) or engage in Process C (working on improving the worst parts of your personality, for example) or learn Lesson D (how to share your personal spaces with someone, perhaps).
The list of prices to be paid for the things we want can seem nearly as endless as the number of things we find ourselves wanting, but that’s not the only kind of obstacle that might stand in our way.
Sometimes there are other people who believe they know better than us, or who think it would be to their detriment to see us fulfil our desire, or who want the same things we want and don’t like to share, and so they might move to oppose us. This is the realm of politics and interpersonal drama, and the prices we end up paying in these arenas are usually no less painful—and often much steeper.
Endowing a character with a powerful desire is a great first step, but it has no purpose if that desire is not meaningfully opposed by someone or something within the story world.
A desire immediately granted may as well just be backstory.
How a character responds to opposition reveals as much about him, if not more, than what he desires in the first place, which means that depicting conflict and its consequences in your fiction is probably the single most useful exercise in characterisation an author can do.
A lot more can be said about conflict—and we’ll be returning to this topic again and again in The Hard Yards—but for now, let’s move on to some of the more squishy of cornerstones.
Vulnerabilities
A lot of writing advice out there insists that making your characters likeable is critical to making them compelling.
Turns out this is completely wrong.
Lolita, Gone With The Wind, House of Cards, Wuthering Heights, Gone Girl, Crime and Punishment, Catch-22, How To Get Away With Murder.
The stream of books, movies and TV shows that revolve around unlikeable-yet-compelling characters is near-endless.
One way of drawing an audience closer to an unlikeable character and squeezing sympathy out of their cold, dead hearts is creating a sense of vulnerability around the character.
Annalise Keating of How To Get Away With Murder is pretty disagreeable when you meet her in the first season. She’s cold, brusque, at times almost vicious. There’s not much to like there, aside from her style and the larger-than-life stature she is granted second-hand through the admiration of her law students.
But watch as she is beset by problem after problem, twist after twist, and by the end of the season (if not sooner) you find yourself rooting for her. Despite her status as a high-powered attorney, her characterisation is drenched in vulnerability (and played to perfection by the wonderful Viola Davis). There is the constant sense that at any moment, just the wrong thing said at just the wrong time can bring everything crashing down around her, and that implicit threat weaves a kind of spell that draws the audience in and compels them to keep watching, to see whether the next twist will be the one that finally undoes her entire life.
Throughout all of this, she doesn’t become any more likeable. She doesn’t have to. The vulnerabilities built into her very core—and expertly antagonised at every turn by the events of the plot—serve to bind the audience to her.
That’s the definition of compelling.
In the 2023 black comedy Wicked Little Letters, Olivia Colman’s character, Edith Swan, is presented as a sort of false protagonist early in the story. Even though it’s pretty clear early on that she will turn out to be the film’s main “villain” (let’s be real: it’s obvious from just watching the film’s trailer, so I’m not too concerned by spoilers here; if you are, skip the rest of this paragraph right now and go watch the movie!), by the time that revelation comes by the midpoint, the story has already shown her oppressive home life under her father’s tyranny to such great effect that you’re not even mad at her for writing the titular wicked letters. You’re actually rooting for her to go to prison by the end, not because she’s the “bad guy” but because you so desperately want her to get out from under her father’s shadow. That subversion was achieved entirely through depicting Edith’s vulnerability.
Regina George of Mean Girls (2004) is pretty despicable throughout the movie, but she is deemed one of modern pop cinema’s great redeemed villains—a twist that was created entirely by exploiting the audience’s sympathy for vulnerabilities. I have always believed that Tina Fey cheated by sending a literal school bus to do the job that should have been done by a conflict-driven self-revelation, but it only goes to show: there are no rules in storytelling, as long as you achieve the desired effect in the audience’s mind.
How do you go about building vulnerability into a character?
It all hinges on threat. Anything could work, as long as it suggests something that may hurt the character in the future (or did so in the past).
Some vulnerabilities are physical: an old wound, a scar that hides an interesting bit of backstory, an illness.
Some are inherent in the character’s, well, character: people who have the capacity for self-reflection and doubt will always come across as more vulnerable than the boorish prigs that merely charge through life, oblivious to the harm they cause.
Some vulnerabilities are situational: the events of the plot can provide an endless source of threats to the wellbeing of any and all characters.
Some are moral: is the character at risk of guilt or judgement due to the choices he is forced to make?
What all vulnerabilities have in common is that they make us care, if we have any heart at all, about what will happen to that character. Perhaps this is because these vulnerabilities remind us of our own weaknesses, places where we might be hurt or compromised if we are not careful. Seeing how these fictional people deal with their tender spots is a way for us to manage ours, and that is often a large part of the ultimate meaning we seek in our stories.
One particularly juicy source of vulnerability forms the fourth cornerstone, and that is…
Secrets
Keeping something secret creates a massive vulnerability, by its very definition.
Any person who learns the secret gains immediate power, and can attack at his or her leisure, whether by revealing the truth or blackmailing the owner of the secret.
That’s it for secrets as vulnerabilities—simple, obvious, easy to understand.
But there is a second aspect to secrets that makes them useful for characterisation, and it’s this that elevates secrets to a cornerstone in their own right.
My cat is a docile animal. She is generally calm and mostly quiet.
That is, until I close one of the doors in my house, leaving her on the other side. Whether it’s to take a soothing bath or just have five minutes of quiet time in the meditation room, as soon as I close that door, she turns into a holy terror, scratching up the carpet on the threshold, yowling in offended protest. And when I open it to let her in, does she come right in to engage in some pressing feline business? No, of course not.
She just can’t stand having that barrier between her and the unknown.
She has to know.
Curiosity is deceptively potent, and giving a character secrets to keep from both the audience and the other characters is a ridiculously overpowered technique. It’s pretty much cheating. I shouldn’t even be telling you this, but oh well.
In our quest for parsing meaning out of the fiction we consume as readers and viewers, secrets are a nemesis we cannot tolerate. We sense them about characters like an alluring scent, and like a bloodhound we will follow along, watching and waiting, weighing every bit of nuance and innuendo to find the answers—we will follow that character over mountains and across oceans if only it means that finally, mercifully, we may know.
And that which we eventually find out may surprise us more than we expect, and may or may not seem to make sense entirely, which brings us to our final cornerstone.
Contradictions
Like secrets, contradictions we detect in other people (including fictional characters) stand out to us immediately, drawing attention and arousing curiosity.
What’s up with that 6-foot dude called Tiny, or the bully with the squeaky voice?
Why is a tough gangster who murders at the drop of a hat shown to be caring, almost tender, to his ailing father at home?
In Minority Report, Tom Cruise’s John Anderton is an excellent law enforcer by day, yet at night he trawls the streets for illegal drugs. What the heck is up with that?
Clearly some character contradictions carry more weight than others, but they all represent a type of secret: we sense something is off, we suspect because something about the character’s background or disposition is being hidden from us. We become curious not only why that contradiction is there (looking backward), but how it will impact the story (looking forward).
We want to know what it means.
But beyond just piquing curiosity, contradictions are a way to bring some of life’s weirdness and whimsy into our fiction, a sort of truth-telling that quietly admits that yes, sometimes the real world can be a strange and messy place.
Sometimes Vladimir collects ceramic unicorns (IYKYK).
Of course, contradictions should be wielded with care. It’s unwise to slap two wildly different traits together in a character and hope it’s going to work out.
BBC’s Sherlock started off incredibly well, but by the later seasons, the cold analytical genius we’d come to know and love was having more and more emotionally affected, his deductions becoming more magical than rational, and his personality going through weird shifts. Perhaps these contradictions didn’t outright assassinate the character, but they sure were a little unfortunate.
The purpose of all this characterisation work, after all, is believability.
A better strategy is to consider the character as a whole, and work out what sorts of contradictions might make sense in that context. If you’re injecting a contradiction to make your audience question why it’s there, it’s a good idea for you actually have that answer ready to go, even if you don’t make a big deal out of spelling it out in the story.
And there we have it.
Five useful areas to keep in mind when you’re building your fictional people.
One important note here: Don’t feel like you need to use these categories as a mandatory checklist. Not every single character you create needs to be loaded to the gills with every secret, contradiction and vulnerability you can possibly brainstorm for them.
Instead, think of these as five useful lenses through which to view your characters, and maybe tune up certain areas where they might not be constructed quite as robustly as they could be.
The closer a character is to being in the central cast of your story—main characters, like protagonists, heroes, antagonists and villains—the more you might want to consider evaluating them using these five categories, and building from there.
It’s perfectly acceptable for the flower-seller where your romantic hero buys the roses for his date, who has a single line of dialogue and no name, to be created without any of these cornerstones built in.
Sometimes a character is just meant to be a cog in the machine, and that’s okay too.
This week’s supplemental post on Friday will be a cheat sheet that covers all this territory, a nice little reminder of what areas you can look at when building your characters.
Go on and try applying a couple of these lenses to your current favourite WIP characters and let me know in the comments whether it helped you.
Happy writing!