Understanding Characters: Tracy Culleton

We get to know a character throughout the course of a story, through:

• What he/she says
• What he/she thinks
• What he/she does
• What others say about him/her
• To a lesser extent: how he/she dresses, lives etc.
• Also to a lesser extent: how he/she speaks.

If you are a new writer it certainly helps, but you don’t have to know everything about the character before you start – sometimes you learn about them as the story develops. The characters reveal themselves to you with each twist of the plot. But do remember to make notes on the character as you go along – or you will spend hours trying to find where you wrote the name of your heroine’s aunt’s dog when you need to mention it again, time that could be spent writing!

Remember when you are thinking about each character, every story is about conflict. The protagonist wants something and can’t have it, or has something that someone else wants! Unless your character wants it very, very badly (motivation), they’ll just give up and go home and you will have no story.  Your character also has to have big and credible reasons why he/she can’t have it, or they’ll get it instantly, and there will be no story.

Getting what the character wants must be difficult or again, there will be no story.

Your character MUST grow and mature in the process of finding/winning what she wants at the beginning of the story – he/she must change and develop as a result of the story (the character arc), or there is no story.

Remember, no character is perfect – that’s a caricature, not a character. Even your ‘bad’ characters aren’t all bad; and they’re definitely justified in their own minds.

HIERARCHY OF NEEDS

Every writer needs to know about Abraham Maslow’s famous Hierarchy of Needs. He identified five needs, the one at the bottom physicological being the most basic. If people don’t have that need met, it takes all their attention and they don’t even think of other needs. But once that need is met, they immediately begin focussing on the next higher need. Others have expanded upon his work to further sub-divide those needs into more detailed categories. I replicate below one of these charts:

So the most basic need to be met is physiological (i.e. food etc). Above that, not surprisingly, is the need for safety.

But we will risk our safety in order to meet our physiological needs? Primitive hunters attacking mammoths for example, risked their safety but did so in order to meet their food needs. (I have always wondered if people who practise extreme sports, endangering their life, have the need for that adrenalin rush as one of their physiological needs, i.e. they need it more than they need safety.)

Next after the safety needs (including survival) comes what to me is rather surprising: social needs - the need to belong and to receive love. It goes without saying that we’re a tribal/herd species, but the need to belong is so basic that it is very interesting. It means that we want to belong more than we want to meet our own esteem needs such as status or achievement or being admired, and more than we want to know and understand life, or to meet our aesthetic needs for beauty. Most versions of the Maslow graph also have self-actualisation at the top, which includes spiritual needs.

As writers, we can use this model for our characters’ motivations. It’s an extreme example, but you would never have your character sitting down meditating (i.e. meeting her self-actualisation needs) in a burning building – her safety needs would definitely take precedence.   Making your characters three dimensional and believable is about understanding their needs, their motivations for their actions.

Every story is about a character wanting something but not being able to have it. The Hierarchy of Needs gives you lots of examples of the sorts of things characters might want.

©Tracy Culleton for writing.ie

Tracy Culleton runs the www.fiction-writers-mentor.com, and works extensively for Inkwell Writers Workshops, facilitating the hugely popular online workshop Write That Book that has taken many authors from blank page to finished manuscript.

Born in Dublin in 1964, she has been writing all her life, but began her professional writing career in 2002 with the non-fiction book ‘Simply Vegetarian’. Her fiction career began when she won the 2003 'Write A Bestseller' Competition jointly run by Poolbeg and RTE's Open House. This winning novel, ‘Looking Good’, went on to spend three weeks in the top ten. ‘Loving Lucy’ was published in 2004 and ‘More Than Friends’ in 2005. She is currently working on her fourth novel, ‘Grace Under Pressure’.

Tracy has extensive experience in adult education, having worked with NALA as an adult literacy tutor. Tracy is an expert in EFL and has a special interest in the reasons for, and the cures for, writer's block. She has written a non -fiction book on the subject, available as a free e-Book on her website www.fiction-writers-mentor.com.

See Tracy's other articles on writing.ie: On the unreliable narrator, see this link: http://bit.ly/gOXP1o; Tracy talks about point of view in a narrative: http://bit.ly/gr2Xd5; All you need to know about dialogue: http://bit.ly/gYZOzt; The Essential Elements of Description: http://bit.ly/e1FJs9; the importance of showing, not telling: http://bit.ly/i3MHlQ.