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160 sats \ 3 replies \ @hannotek 27 Oct \ on: What character traits do you most want your character(s) to have? the_stacker_muse
I love thoughts like this!
Whenever I envision a character for a story, I like to focus on their grit, the stuff that makes them real. It is that grittiness, from the trenches of their lives, the unexpected strengths, that makes this imaginary person real and tangible.
Throughout my life as a soldier, or a diesel mechanic, or a salesman, or writer, I have encountered many real people who have real strengths, real weaknesses, and a profound sense of dedication to something in life.
Grit is that eclectic mixture of our flawed dedication to some aspect of life and that irreducible drive to accomplish an otherwise unimportant goal or task.
Grit is the guy going through a divorce who repairs engines on fire trucks as he silently suffers through cancer because he doesn’t want his ten-year-old daughter to worry or think him weak.
Grit is the overweight, introverted salesman who makes up for a low self esteem by becoming the best salesman in the company, just so he can prove to his father that he’s not a failure in life.
Grit is the young adult addicted to pornography who longs so much for human intimacy that suicide is a daily threat.
For my characters, grit is just the stuff that makes them real and relatable, highlighting their struggles even when they succeed.
Grit is the real humanity behind the facade of perfection we often portray to strangers. If anything, I want my characters to have grit so the reader can instantly connect and live through them and their story.
Thanks for sharing! These types of writing experiments are always rewarding to me.
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Thanks for the detailed message and for sharing your process!
It’s always interesting to read how people - fictional or real - overcome trials in their lives.
Have you written about characters who LACK grit?
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That’s a great question, and I don’t really know if I have done so on purpose.
I’ve written plenty characters that were just boring and flat. They were like cardboard cutouts, in that they looked like characters but they had no depth. And when I first started writing years ago, I just couldn’t figure out why my story wasn’t moving forward. I thought the plot was wrong, or even that my ideas for the story weren’t worth writing down.
In 2019, I attended a fiction workshop with other writers, and I realized that the characters I was writing were a big part of my problem. A YA fantasy writer named Kirk interrogated my characters and wanted to know about who they really were.
After just a few questions, I realized what he was trying to teach me: if I wanted to write realistic characters, then they had to be real. If they weren’t real to me, then they wouldn’t be real to the reader either.
Honestly, that workshop was more way than worth the few hundred dollars that it cost. It taught me something so simple that it’s almost stupid–Without characters you don’t have a story, and without real characters you won’t have readers.
There are many ways flesh out characters, like the sheets someone else mentioned earlier in this thread. And the great part is that they can be whoever you want them to be. I just focus on the “grit” because that helps keep me grounded. Otherwise, my characters would likely all be superheroes with no flaws and perfect lives, and that just sounds abysmal!
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