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It can be hard to explain what I mean with this term. I don't mean characters who are physically wider, BBW appeal notwithstanding. What I'm talking about is personality. My storytelling habits really divide into two phases right now. One of them was Before NiS (before Arie & Brandon, really), and the other is After. In this After world I've been trusting my instincts and letting characters play out differently than I had before. Instead of the relatively narrow focus I had applied to them, I have what I, for lack of a better term, would like to call Wide Characters. When we first start with this whole writing business, we come up with characters. Generally, these characters are relatively one-note: they have a single, specific arc which they're going to follow, and they don't much deviate from that. Obviously, there's nothing wrong with this; if anything, there's something wrong with the no-note character, who starts out one way and doesn't move. Such characters are okay in stroke vignettes, but you can't build a real story without some growth involved. The problem comes when we, as authors, forget to give the characters any more elbow room. There's a well-documented psychological phenomenon called the fundamental attribution error, which states that, when human beings evaluate another person's behavior, we are more likely to assume that the person's behavior is indicative of their personality than we are to ask about circumstantial evidence. In other words, I'm allowed to be rude to you when I order my coffee, that's excusable because it doesn't reflect my personality: I just got up on the wrong side of the bed this morning. You, giving me my coffee, get no such excuse: if you're rude about it, it's because you are an asshole. The lesson to be learned here is, simply, that people are not always themselves. We have personalities, true, but sometimes something else is forefront on our list of "stuff I want to act out today". Maybe we're angry. Maybe we're lovesick. Maybe we're love-drunk. Maybe a relative just died. If personality is a picture, then mood is the slide projector which flashes that picture up on the wall. Let's just take an average character "Randy" whom we might find having adventures on this site. He's 23, single, constantly flopping in and out of women's beds, probably has a daughter by now on some hapless young woman whom he slept with and never thought of again (that is, until she came banging on the door demanding child support). He is, in a word, selfish. He doesn't know how to give to other people; for that matter, he may not even know how to give to himself. He just takes and takes and takes. And then we enter this girl "Hazel," a fair and gentle-hearted lass, who will transform him in some way, teach him the error of his ways; teach him to grow up and learn and drop his endless self-absorption and be able to love. (I kinda wanna write this now. Even though I've got two other stories on the burner and a gajillion others waiting their turn...) Now. Randy, obviously, has some growth to do. He needs to change from a self-obsessed, insensitive asshat to—well, it depends on what story you want to write, but at the very least he needs to redeem himself in the eyes of Hazel, and maybe of "Stacy" (the girl who bore his child) as well. (I wonder what the daughter is named. It needs to be something clean and innocent, with nature overtones, like "Rose" or "June" or "Dawn".) If you want to write Disney, you go whole frog and turn him into a Prince Charming. If you don't, if you wanna go romantic-comedy, you stop him halfway, let him retain some of the more practical aspects of assholedom while nonetheless learning the more useful principles of selflessness as well. You could also waffle as to whether he hooks up with Hazel or gets back together with Stacy; two very different stories, clearly, each with their own potential. (Would anyone like to do a "take-it-and-run-with-it" project, where we take this basic premise and write it our own ways? But I'm getting ahead of myself.) But the point is, Randy has some learning to do. (No, the names are pure coincidence. You can't do a version where Randy doesn't change and gets killed in a barfight in Alaska, while Stacy falls in love with a minor but eventually marries someone who's right for her. Besides, somebody already did that version. Sheesh, you guys. Have a little originality here.) Okay, so far so good. Randy's going to evolve over the course of the story. What's the problem? The problem is denying him elbow room. The problem is nailing him to a railway line. The problem is saying, "He's going through those changes, but I'm not letting him have any other freedom in the story." This is sometimes a symptom of extensively-plotted stories, but it's also a sign of a writer who still has some evolving to do. The assumption is that, if Randy ever shows a different mood or a different side of himself, there has to be a reason from within the story. Furthermore, it has to be an important reason (for instance, Hazel finally slept with him); it has to be something that gets worked into the plot. And it's that last sentiment that trips people up. Because it isn't very realistic, isn't it? Randy isn't always going to be a purely-exploitative, stone-hearted bastard; Stacy, despite her devotion to her daughter, will have moments where she just can't take Dawn's squalling any longer; and no matter how bright-hearted Hazel is, she'll have days where she needs to hide her face from the world and be left to herself for a while. Personality isn't a single path. Personality is a range of behaviors. Yes, Randy is a stone-cold bastard most of the time, but he'll still have moments of fragility, or generosity, or humor—just the same as we do. This is why I call them "wide" characters: because their behavior has room to wobble even within the standards of "normal." Just like real human beings do. I think that, at the very least, you ought to have several "settings" for each character: Happy/Content, Sad/Depressed, and Angry/Irritated. And on top of that you have "Plot-Related" setting, which is their central "tic", their hook, the direction they're going—their "normal" setting, in other words. Obviously, in someone like Hazel's case, "Plot-Related" overlaps with Happy/Content to a fair extent, because she has a habit of going through life with a smile on her face, but you can certainly find your wiggle room somewhere. And the key is this: in writing any given scene for any given character, feel free to use any of those settings. It's perfectly okay for Stacy to just be grumpy today. It's perfectly okay for Hazel's jokes to fall flat for some reason. It's perfectly okay for Randy to be even harsher than usual right now. One-note characters are just that: one-note. They have their paths, and they're not allowed to deviate or even wobble from them one bit. If Randy is going to be a stone-cold jackass, he's going to be a stone-cold jackass—and there's no room for his behavior to be colored by anything as unimportant as whether he's just in a good mood today. Don't do that. It may not have much of an effect on the story itself, obviously, but it has a huge effect on you, the writer, and your conception of the characters themselves. You can only create interesting, fleshed-out, many-layered characters if you allow them to be those things in your head. And it's that permission which I'm trying to encourage you to give them. Does this work? Does it help? I have no idea. I'm thinking out loud here; I certainly can't claim that my characters are three-dimensional. Maybe one-and-a-half-dimensional, if I'm lucky. All I know is that when I hit this understanding—when I allowed my characters to deviate from their "schtick"s, and try on something new for a change as my (or their) whim dictated—the characters got more interesting. As each of them brought more and more behavior under the umbrella of "normal", it became more fun and more interesting to write them. Suddenly there were ways to get almost any response out of almost any person—as opposed to the Naked in School days, where I needed Sajel if I wanted deadpan sarcasm, or Zach for a hopelessly lame one-liner, or Derek for absurdisms and flights of fancy; and if I didn't have that character in the scene, I just couldn't use that response. (Hell, remember what it was like before we had Christa around to take the wind out of Zach's sails?) "Normal personality" is a spectrum, not a pinprick. Don't limit yourself. Build wide characters. Free your mind. |