What Weakens a Character
This week I want to talk about some details or habits that might weaken your character writing. It’s a constant worry if your character is portraying the ideas and habits you want them to but you might be making some choices that weaken them in the eyes of the reader. To avoid this, let’s run through five of the ways you may be unintentionally weakening your character.
Today’s examples are things I have seen many times in my editing and proofreading work. These are common problems but none of them are hard to fix. I think it’s one of those things where once you realize you are doing this, you can fix it.
To make this advice a little more entertaining and easier to grasp, I want to introduce you to my character Tommy. Tommy Backwater is nineteen and has an unhealthy obsession with Vikings. He lives in landlocked Springfield, Missouri, USA, and is determined to get out of town. I’ll be using him in some of my examples!
Characters That Don’t Care
“Hey, Tommy! Your mom told me about the accident. Are you okay?” Jaz asked. Jaz approached Tommy where he sat on the park bench. Tommy slapped his knees and stood up. He didn’t want to talk to her.
“The car got totaled but I escaped with only a scratch,” Tommy answered. He flexed his wiry arm, showing a dark bruise.
“That’s terrible! Were you able to make it to the hospital in time?” Jaz asked.
“No, I was in the police station when Gramps passed away. Didn’t make it because of the accident.”
Jaz sits on the park bench, her wide eyes following Tommy. “That’s horrible,” she whispers.
“Eh, I don’t really care.” Why should he think about it so much? There was nothing he could do.
I’ve seen this a lot. There is a challenge in creating a calm, cool, or nonchalant characters. It might seem cool if your character can face a challenge and they just sigh and remain calm…but if your character goes through a big experience and in the end says, “Well, it’s not like I actually care,” your readers are not going to care either.
In this example, we learn that Tommy got into a bad accident, presumably rushing to get to the hospital before his grandfather passed away. That’s a lot and he can remain cool and calm while allowing himself to process these things but the second he says, “Eh, I don’t care,” readers will stop caring too. If your readers don’t care, what’s the point of this entire section?
Over Varied Dialogue Tags
What are dialogue tags? Dialogue tags are the words after dialogue such as “he said” or “I asked.”
Emotions for characters can be hard to write, especially if you are imagining them constantly flipping through different emotions. To write a high-emotion scene, it is important to pick and choose when your character goes over the edge and reacts strongly. But, if you have your character overreacting every other line, the reverse will happen, and they will read as confusing and indecisive.
Let’s take a look at this example. Pay attention to how many different dialogue tags there are.
“And then they took the coast,” Tommy exclaimed. He waved his arm in the air, mimicking a Viking warrior, his broom a battle axe, his book a leather shield.
“Tommy, you are so silly,” Tommy’s mom said. She was sitting aside in the living room, watching him from the couch. Tommy was 14 years old, dressing up for Halloween.
“But Vikings are the best!” Tommy screamed. He waved his broom and nearly knocked over a lamp.
“Tommy, be careful!” his mom shouted.
“Okay, sorry mom,” Tommy whispered. He dropped his broom and steadied the lamp.
“It’s fine but take your games outside. Okay?”
“I don’t want to go outside,” Tommy whined.
There is a lot of whining, screaming, and shouting. It’s too much! It is a good instinct to vary your word choice here but using “said” is the golden standard. It might seem repetitive to say, “Tommy said,” but it is a word that blends into the background. Dialogue tags can be distracting if you use too much variety because it sounds like your character is having a meltdown if they yell, shout, scream, whine, and whisper all in one paragraph. Making this varied use sparser can increase the impact of what you decide to write.
Sassy Characters
Have you ever read a book where the writer went overboard in an attempt to make their characters sound cool? Cue lots of swearing, high-intense emotions, and constant sass in every line of dialogue. This is exhausting to read and will come off flat if your character is always operating at top intensity. It’s important to spread it out and pick what moments your character is going overboard VS when they are acting normal.
On swearing, I’ve discussed this before in a previous WWW called “Characters”:
“Bad*ss characters: The worst cliché to me, is having a character that swears in every single sentence. A lot of younger writers do this, but I have seen it in early drafts in college too. Swearing in a story sticks out like a sore thumb. So, use it once when it is most impactful, but do not use it again because that will be such a noticeable repetition to your reader, it will lose all its impact and power.
“Trying to make your character bad*ss with lots of swearing… this just reminds me of those uncool kids in elementary school who would swear on the bus. It’s not bad*ass—it negatively makes a character seem younger and immature in this aspect and it also breaks up and distracts from the regular dialogue.”
The Observer
There is a fine line between your main character being involved and just watching everything happen. Your main character is the vessel between the reader and the story. It can be hard to write! You have to balance descriptions, the setting, character thoughts, actions, and more. It can be really easy to have your main character sit back and just tell the reader everything that is happening around them…but you do not want to do this!
If your main character is in a scene where they are actively not participating and are only watching, your reader will feel like they are sitting back and only watching too. This creates a very removed moment for the reader. Your challenge as the writer is to give the reader an immersive experience instead.
The next time you have a scene where your character is not actively taking part or effecting the scene, you will need to reconsider their placement or evolvement. A good way to gauge this is if you remove your main character from the scene and nothing changes—that means they are not involved in that scene.
Character Style
Sometimes when writing a character, you might create them based off a cool detail. Maybe you think of their design and outfit first, you think of a cool name, or they have crazy colored eyes. All these details can be fun to work with but be careful they are not the most important part of your character.
For example, your eye color does not define your personality, strengths, weaknesses, or tastes. It’s really easy to get caught up in these kinds of details but it is important to recognize they are only cosmetic details. To build a strong character, you need to focus on their wants, needs, personality, and more.
Round VS Flat Characters
A round character is someone who changes or evolves from the beginning of your story as it progresses.
A flat character is someone who is exactly the same from the beginning to the end of your story. You want to avoid writing these characters (unless it is on purpose) because these are not characters your readers will be invested in. We want to see characters who grow, struggle, and evolve as the story goes on (or go backwards!)
Conclusion
That’s about it for this week! Writing characters can be really fun but it’s important to remember their role and influence on the plot of your story. Flashy characters without personality or purpose in a story are flat and uninteresting in the end. As I’ve said before, when designing a character, it’s important to build them from these key questions:
What does your character want?
Why can’t they get what they want?
What are they willing to do or sacrifice in order to get it?
These details will give you a plot, a challenge, and more. We don’t need to know their eye color, favorite food, and what they like to do in their free time in order to write a story. Focus on the who, what, and why and you’ll be on your way to building an engaging character and story.
Best,
Danni Lynn, Evangeline40003