How to Build Compelling Characters

Compelling Characters get Angry. Or Sad. Or Happy. They are Complex. They are Simple. They are Us.

Characters are why we read novels. As readers, we want to empathize and root for our characters. We want to know the trouble they face, and how they respond to that trouble. We want to know if they give up (they can’t), what they do in the face of trouble (they must overcome it [or not]), and we must care about them if we’re to continue reading on. A great part of that equation is that we need to relate, in some way, to our hero. She must respond in ways we understand, because we have felt the emotions she feels, or, at the very least, make us curious to know the motivation behind why she acts the way she acts in the situations in which she finds herself. As a writer, it’s your job to make that happen.

Luckily, there are more than a few tools at your disposal on how to build compelling characters to make your readers experience the ups and downs of the people you want them to care so much about. Here are a few:

Show, Don’t Tell

How a character acts—their movements, their actions, their expressions, what they say and how they say it, all these things show what your character is feeling (or what they want other characters to think they’re feeling). When the author, through the narrator, shows what her characters are doing, we learn about the character’s emotions because we see them through their actions. And it’s in scene that we see the characters express their feelings by what they do.

Here's a scene from Claire Keegan’s wonderful Small Things Like These that shows Bill Furlong interacting with Eileen, his wife:

She opened the door of the Rayburn, hesitating, for a moment, before dropping the letters in, on the flame.

‘They're getting hearty Eileen.’

‘You know, we'll blink a few times, and they'll be married and gone.’

‘Isn't that the way.’

‘The years don't slow down any as they pass.’

She checked the temperature gauge on the oven, whose needle had dropped to very low, where she wanted it and pulled it in a bit tighter.

Notice how Eileen “hesitates” before “dropping” the letters in on the flame. Notice the dialogue between husband and wife. And then the last line: She “checked” the temperature . . . where she wanted it and “pulled” it in a bit tighter. The dialogue tells us who Eileen is by what she says. She’s a mother who will miss her children. She knows time is short. She’s attuned to details, which we see in her handling of the oven temperature, and makes sure it’s “where she wanted it.” All of these little things build who Eileen is, especially in her relationship to Furlong. The dialogue and her actions play off each other to give readers a fantastic picture of who she (and they) are as people.

Tell

Telling, as we writers know, is, in general, looked down upon. Show, don’t tell, has been blasted into our brains as writers that, at least when we first start out as writers (during the first 10,000 hours of our writing apprenticeship, anyway), is hard to get away from. And there’s a good reason for that: readers want to watch what happens to our characters. They don’t want to be told Hugo snuck into the clock factory: they want to see it. They want to watch Hugo scan the street for the police. They want to watch him smash the window with the cloth-covered brick. They want to watch him grimace at the cut he gets in his gut when the window scrapes him as he struggles to climb into the window. They want to hear him moan. But none of this means you can’t tell how Hugo feels. Here’s an example:

It was early morning, probably two-thirty, two-forty-five, when Hugo snuck out of the room Master Thompson had locked him in two days earlier. Yes, he had been locked in the room. Yes, the room was on the second floor. Yes, jumping down from the roof to the ground was dangerous. But Hugo pushed the fright away. He was mad. He wanted vengeance. He was not going to let Maria get away with it. She had framed him, and now he was going to make her feel the same things he felt—the anger, the injustice, the embarrassment that had turned him the bright red of the apples surrounding Master Thompson’s estate.

All of what you just read is “telling.” The narrator is telling you, the reader, how Hugo feels at having been framed by Maria. We know he’s mad. We know he’s embarrassed. We know he’s after revenge. There’s some action in there, yes. But the passage is, primarily, the narrator providing us with how Hugo feels. And it works. But such a description of what’s happening takes work. Make sure to re-read what you’ve “told” to your reader. Ask yourself if what you’ve described feels right. Is it interesting? Does the reader get a good picture of who your character is, as a person? If so, then you’ve done your job. If you’re unsure, have someone read it and have them provide feedback. Or have them read it aloud to you. Do you know how your character is feeling at that precise moment? Are they happy? Sad? Confused? You should know.

What Feelings do You Feel Looking at This Picture? Sadness, Right? Loneliness? How Would You Write This?

Subtext

One of my favorite ways of showing how a character is feeling is through the use of subtext. Charles Baxter, in the Art of Subtext: Beyond Plot, distinguishes between plot (the surface-level events) and subtext (the hidden meanings and implications). He argues that great fiction often prioritizes subtext, creating an experience that engages the reader's imagination and encourages them to infer deeper meanings. This is a fantastic way to give you a peek behind the curtains of what a character is thinking or feeling.

Picture a man and a woman in a modest apartment in the South Bronx. Now, imagine there’s a knock at the door. The man answers the door but only cracks the door enough so that the police, who’ve been called there by a neighbor, can see his face. “What do you want?” the man says. Already, just by the four word question the man asks, and by the fact that he didn’t open the door all the way for the police, tells us a great deal about this character. He doesn’t like police. He’s rude to police. He’s hiding something. He’s likely had previous run-ins with the law, and he isn’t afraid of them. Now say the police convince him to open the door. Or, better yet, one of the cops shoulders the door open while another officer grabs the man and throws him against the wall. We see the woman standing sideways, the right side of her away from the officers. The officer who shouldered the door walks over, grabs the woman’s arm lightly, and turns her so her black eye is visible to everyone in the room. “What happened?” the officer asks. The woman’s shoulders are hunched over. Her breathing is erratic. She’s on the verge of tears. The officer asks her again. What happened? he says. She immediately looks at her husband. He’s staring at her. He doesn’t take his eyes off of her, and she doesn’t take her eyes off of him. “Nothing,” she says. “I fell.”

In this scene, we know exactly what’s going on, and no one’s even approached the subject. The subtext (and the black eye) tell the reader everything they need to know about what’s going on between the husband and wife. We know the husband is telling his wife to keep her mouth shut or else. We know she’s going to. Or not. Maybe this is the moment she’s decided to fight back. To get out of the abusive relationship. Or maybe she tells the cops to leave. To stop bothering them and for them to go to hell. Which will tell us more about who she is and how she feels, given her circumstance. The emotion in this scene is palpable, and it gives readers exactly what they’re seeking: the ability to live vicariously through the novel’s characters without any of the repercussions.

Internal Dialogue

I won’t get into all the ways you can create and show emotion in your characters, but I thought I’d touch on something that’s not always top of mind when discussing the emotions of characters. All the above is about external situations—scenes between characters and the actions they take during those scenes. The things that lay beneath the words and actions of the characters during those scenes, highlighted by the subtle movements of the characters—a look (or a look away), a need for separation, the hiding of the black eye. The narrator’s descriptions of how characters are feeling provides distance from the character, because we’re being told secondhand about what’s happening and how a character feels. It’s only internal dialogue that has the character saying nothing but telling the reader everything.

Internal dialogue is the voice in a character’s head. It’s the conversation a character has with themselves, and the reader often learns a great deal about how the character is feeling, how they’re coping with something, what they want, and so on. It doesn’t have to be blunt or right in the reader’s face; in fact, it can be subtle, causing the reader to extrapolate exactly what’s going on and how the character feels about what’s going on.

Characters Readers Relate to Gives Writers the Ability to Use Short Cuts. "She Smiled." "He Punched the Wall."

Here's the famous opening to William Faulkner’s the Sound and the Fury, told by Caddie through internal dialogue:

April Seventh, 1928.

“Through the fence, between the curling flower spaces, I could see them hitting. They were coming toward where the flag was and I went along the fence. Luster was hunting in the grass by the flower tree. They took the flag out, and they were hitting. Then they put the flag back and they went to the table, and he hit and the other hit. Then they went on, and I went along the fence. Luster came away from the flower tree and we went along the fence and they stopped and we stopped and I looked through the fence while Luster was hunting in the grass.

"Here, caddie." He hit. They went away across the pasture. I held to the fence and watched them going away.

"Listen at you, now." Luster said. "Aint you something, thirty three years old, going on that way. After I done went all the way to town to buy you that cake. Hush up that moaning. Aint you going to help me find that quarter so I can go to the show tonight."

They were hitting little, across the pasture. I went back along the fence to where the flag was. It flapped on the bright grass and the trees.

"Come on." Luster said. "We done looked there. They aint no more coming right now. Les go down to the branch and find that quarter before them niggers finds it."

It was red, flapping on the pasture. Then there was a bird slanting and tilting on it. Luster threw. The flag flapped on the bright grass and the trees. I held to the fence.”

Now, Benjy doesn’t dive deep into his emotions here. His internal dialogue (interrupted by actual dialogue between characters) is straightforward. His actions are direct, and we don’t get a lot of “I was angry,” or “I laughed,” or anything like that. Instead, we get Benjy saying that there is a lot of “hit[ting].” He doesn’t react; he just watches and reports to us, the reader, what he’s witnessing. But as he’s watching, he holds onto the fence. Twice. Benjy, internally, is telling and showing us that he’s bothered in some way by the hitting, and that he is seeking a sort of protection and perhaps the need for stability from the chaos around him by holding onto the fence. We later (although we probably suspect from the opening scene) that there’s something off about Benjy. But as critics have pointed out, Benjy’s state as someone who views the world through the prism of mental illness represents the decline of the Compson family.

It is Benjy’s internal dialogue that presents an almost stoic and detached view of the initial scene, a scene which is elevated by the fact that Benjy has gotten stuck on a nail while climbing the fence as he and Luster search for a quarter that Benjy lost. Benjy tells the facts as they are. He doesn’t tell the reader anything about how he feels; we feel what Benjy feels, because he’s the camera through which the reader sees what’s happening.

Internal dialogue is a tool you can use however you see fit. First person lends toward using internal dialogue: “I thought I’d kick him in the shin. He made me hurt, and I was going to make him hurt no matter what anyone said I should or shouldn’t do.” But that’s obviously not something that’s set in stone. You can use internal dialogue in third person or even second person. The goal is to not only let you know what’s going on with a character; it’s also to let you know how they’re feeling, what they’re thinking about doing, who they’re thinking about, and so on.

Characters, as mentioned earlier, are what readers care about. Yes, there are plot-oriented novels, but we remember characters. We remember Ignatius J. Reilly. We remember Scarlett O’Hara. We remember Holden Caufield, Sherlock Holmes, Humbert Humbert, Atticus Finch, Rabbit Angstrom, and a thousand other characters, because their authors created in them mirrors in which we see ourselves and others. They gave them the ability to hate. To be envious. To love. To lust. To be brave. You, as a writer, must create the same emotions in your characters. Use whatever tools exist to do as you see fit to build the best characters you can. Show your characters reacting or acting to something in their way. Let them think about how they feel. Have your characters say something without uttering a word. The more skills you develop in building who your characters are and how they feel about certain situations and other characters will ensure your readers stay with you. Your readers want to cheer for someone. Your job is to make want to.

Cully Perlman is an author, blogger, and Substantive Editor. He can be reached at Cully@novelmasterclass.com

Me. In Taos. Trying to Look Cool.