Tag: Essays

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How to Develop Your Characters on the Page

A doctor shows a patient a chest x-ray and points approximately to where the heart is located.
“You see, your character’s heart should be right about here.” (Photo by Skintone Studio from Freerange Stock)

My last craft post covered how to develop characters for your understanding as the writer. I’ve split this crash course in character development into two parts because characters develop in two main spaces. Well, three, actually: the writer’s head, the page, and the reader’s head. Your perception of your character is inevitably different than the one that exists on the page and is further invariably different from the one that the reader comes to know. I won’t be going into readers’ heads because that would be presumptive and rude.

In my previous post, I made another critical separation. I split you planners and pantsers into your respective groups, and I gave the former a whole heap of questions to consider in your logic-centric minds. For the latter, I gave you some tips that almost resemble exercises, and they are focused on helping you get the feel of your characters. For both groups, it all was work for you to do for yourself, work intended to pour the foundations for your characters so you could write from a place of intentionality instead of wandering and wondering what the heck you’re writing about (an affliction that plagues us all, I promise).

Now, let’s look at developing your characters on the page for the reader’s understanding. How does character development actually work on the page anyway?

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How to Develop Your Characters off the Page

A black cat reaches out to touch a human finger in a reference to the Creation of Adam painting
Photo by Humberto Arellano on Unsplash

Last time I wrote about craft, I directed you to the starting line. In that post, I wrote superficially about getting to know your characters, kicking off the plot, building your world, and the search for information. Someone asked me about developing that stuff, and I realized I’d glossed over it. I’d told you it was important work but took for granted you’d already done it.

Oops!

So let’s talk about character development. When we talk about character development in a story, we typically refer to the ways in which that story develops its characters on the page. How do the characters develop for the reader? What does the reader come to learn and understand about the characters, and how do the characters change through their arc? What story does that arc tell, and what significance can the reader derive from it? Those are questions I won’t be addressing in this post but will in a later one. This time, I focus on developing your characters off the page for your understanding. How do you create a character so that you understand and know them well enough to then insert them into a story for the reader to meet and follow?

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Short Essay Up on the Cheuse Center Website

A panoramic picture taken at the U.S.-Mexico border. The vantage point is on top of a hill from a dirt road, across a green, swampy landscape, and the viewer can see where construction of Trump's border "wall" ceased.

A couple of summers ago, I was very fortunate to be able to travel for research on my novel in progress. With funding from the Alan Cheuse International Writers Center, I got in my car and drove from my home in Virginia to the U.S.-Mexico border. I’m not talking too much about the novel yet, but you can bet it’s set somewhere between Virginia and the U.S.-Mexico border.

Anyway, the trip was both harrowing and amazing. It was that uncertain summer of Covid in which we had vaccines but we weren’t really sure if everyone was getting them or if they even worked, and on top of that, I was dealing with some ailments that necessitated medical attention and I was in my head about the fact that I was going to some fairly remote parts of the country.

I tend to do that. Get in my head about stuff.

But I did it! I went there and back again (and the only ring involved symbolizes my love for my wife).

Two years and hundreds of thousands of words in the novel later, the trip has been incredibly inspirational and informative to the point that I’ve been, perhaps unwittingly, working on a personal narrative essay about it, too.

The Cheuse Center has been publishing short works inspired by their fellows’ trips, and Leeya Mehta, interim director of the center, contacted me about contributing. I ended up sending her many more words than she likely expected or wanted, but we were able to focus in on one portion of my essay in progress about my novel in progress.

You can read “The Line We Drew at the End of a Nation” now. I hope you enjoy it. Maybe someday the full version will be out there somewhere.

For you fellow authors, if you can go to the places you’re writing about, I highly recommend it. I am saying this more and more these days, but to become a better writer, you have to read, write, AND live. There is no substitute for getting away from your computer and experiencing the world you want to write about (yes, even if you’re writing about alien worlds, you should look to ours as reference points, but also, your alien world should, in some way, reflect our world, and I’m in my head about this, aren’t I?).

Digression aside, I have much more confidence in this novel because of the travel afforded to me by this fellowship, and that’s because the novel is much better for it. If you’re an MFA student in the GMU creative writing program, apply for this fellowship.