What Makes a Memorable Character?

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This week I am tickled to be able to play host to new authoress Elizabeth Rose, whose novel Violets are Blue was published in May 2012 and can be found on Amazon.  Elizabeth has been conducting a blog tour, and I'm very pleased that she chose to make Scribbles and Ink Stains one of her stops - especially since her guest post is on creating memorable characters.  Read, enjoy, and remember to check out her lovely blog at Living on Literary Lane!

read and enjoy

When I read a book, the first aspect of it that makes me fall in love are the characters. In my mind, the setting, plot, and dialogue are all various forms of polish that enhance the people around whom the story revolves.

That is every writer's intent, is it not? We want to write characters who are memorable. When you read Anne of Green Gables, did you love the plot of an orphan girl sent to live with a middle-aged brother and sister, or did you fall in love with the scrape-proned title character herself? She is the one we remember the best, and she is the one that keeps us reading the various sequels in the series by L.M. Montgomery. If we hadn't liked Anne, we would have never wanted to read Anne of Avonlea. 

C.S. Lewis' unforgettable opening lines — "There was a boy named Eustace Clarence Scrubb, and he almost deserved it" — are a perfect example of how much a book's readability depends on the characters that inhabit it. When I first read those words as a child, I knew very little about where the plot would carry me, and yet I had already decided that I was going to like this book. Why? Because Lewis opened his book with a character that demanded your attention from the start. Already I was wondering why Eustace almost deserved his horrid name. If you don't care about the characters, it doesn't matter what fantastic plot twists the author puts in his story. You may be surprised that a man who seemed trustworthy is really the villain in disguise, but you'll only yawn in boredom when he wounds the protagonist in a duel. After all, what does it matter that the main character may die in the next three pages? You never cared about him in the first place. Frankly, you're more curious about what you'll be eating for lunch.

Obviously we don't want our readers considering the everyday occurence of a midday meal more exciting than the riveting plots we took months, even years to craft just right. We hope they'll be turning pages feverishly, laughing at certain characters' dialogue, smiling sweetly at the end of a chapter, weeping at an unexpected death. In essence, we want the people we create to become as real as life itself to whomever meets them on the page. We want to write memorable characters.

Which begs the question, what is it exactly that makes a memorable character?

Recipe for Memorable Characters

One dosage per chapter should suffice.

Both faults and virtues. Except for those who swear by the Elsie Dinsmore books, most readers find perfect characters stuffy, unnatural, and discouraging. Why? Because we can't relate to them. It's admirable to have a character who does everything right, but it's not very honest. We're all sinners, whether some wish to accept that fact or not, and we all are going to make mistakes in turn. That's not saying your characters have to be unnaturally immoral just for the sake of "being realistic", though — find a good balance between the two. If you're struggling, just observe the people around you.

Secrets. When was the last time you met a person who told you their life's backstory and everything about them in the first five minutes of conversation? If all that information is put out in the open from the start, not only does it make for some rather dull reading, it also gives the reader little incentive to continue. After all, he or she knows everything there is to know about these characters, and they've barely finished the fifth page. Keep some things secret. Show your characters' personalities through gradual dialogue and actions, rather than a never-ending paragraph of description.

Villains with hearts. Villains who simply go around slaughtering people for absolutely no reason are not very conceivable. Even your antagonists must have some small features that endear them to your readers, or a bit of background on why he or she became this way. Somehow this makes them more deadly, because it temporarily unarms you and can make the good and evil in the story seem less clear-cut (so long as you're not portraying them as good, loving, and just misunderstood, because that ploy has been used one too many times). I can assure you that there are very few people who were born wielding an uninhibited tomahawk with designs on conquering the world. If you've ever met one, I'd love to be introduced . . . from a distance, and in full-body armor, of course.

Natural dialogue. This can be a tricky one for some — myself included — but it's a very crucial part in making your characters seem real. Stiff, queer dialogue is a dead giveaway that the author doesn't know much about how real people speak in daily life. Again, if you are having trouble with this factor, just observe your family and other people around you: how they interact with each other, and how their conversations fit together. It doesn't take too long to get the hang of it.

At the heart of it, writing unforgettable characters is all about portraying real life and different aspects of human nature. Every point in the list above can be boiled down to this simple truth. Seek to portray human nature realistically, and you'll have a cast of fantastic characters before you know it.

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Elizabeth Rose is a follower of the Most High who seeks to live every day of her life in accordance with 1 Corinthians 10:31. She loves all sorts of books (the thicker the better), is convinced that Irish Breakfast tea is the closest thing this world will get to heaven, dances until her feet ache, stays up until all hours writing, wears pearls at every opportunity, and obsesses over Les Misérables and The Scarlet Pimpernel. Her debut novel, Violets Are Blue, was published in May 2012. You can find her on Literary Lane, most likely with The Count of Monte Cristo in hand, and ink on her fingers. 

Les Miserables

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I picked up the unabridged Les Miserables late last month, daunted by reports of Hugo's endless harangues, but determined that if I was going to read this thing, I was going to make it worth my while.  After all, the abridged version is only 200 pages shorter; what's a couple hundred pages?  (We'll ignore the fact that the abridged is in a completely different, probably much less weighty format.)  So, trudging a bit at the start, I began.

Last week I finished the book.  Objectively it didn't take me so very long; in fact, I read it faster than I did The Count of Monte Cristo last year.  But I confess, it felt at times as though the end would never come.  The sheer amount of wordage Hugo uses in detailing things that have almost no impact on the plot is by no means exaggerated.  He starts out the book by introducing the bishop who sets Jean Valjean on the path of morality, admits on the very first page that the following accounts have no immediate importance, and then launches into a 50+ page novella of the bishop's life.  "M'gawk!" I say, profoundly.  Such passages crop up frequently and on a variety of subjects: the battle of Waterloo and the history and purpose of convents are just two subjects that get significant page-time.  And Rachel Heffington, the Ink Pen Authoress, remarked that only Hugo could leave the reader wondering whether Marius dies in order to detail the entire history of Parisian sewers.

"Lean" is by no means the adjective to describe Hugo's style.

In reading the classics, I've learned that getting used to large chunks of dialogue-less narrative is simply a matter of survival.  What bothered me far more than Hugo's verbosity was his sad ignorance in regard to spiritual matters.  Not that this was unexpected: without making him any less culpable, it is accurate to say that he was a product of his environment.  Deism rather than Christianity was the rule of the day, as even a glance over the pages of Les Miserables will show.  Thus, while he speaks of God and even, at times, Jesus Christ, everything is flavored by his philosophy: God appears as an unknowable cosmic Power, existing in every emotion or object that is "good"; Jesus Christ is afforded no higher place than that of a "good" man.  Morality, not redemption, is to be found in the characters of the bishop and of Jean Valjean; good works and not God lead to heaven.  Again, this is present in many if not most of the classics, although I found it particularly prevalent in Hugo and his contemporary Dumas.

At this point, you're probably thinking that I must not have liked the story.  In fact, this wasn't the case at all; I have a strange ability to pick things apart and criticize, and still end by enjoying the whole.  Such was the result with Les Miserables, for despite my irritation with the two matters mentioned above, there were other things that thoroughly caught my interest and won my appreciation.  Being a character-driven writer myself, I was naturally delighted by Hugo's rich cast: in his tying together of the threads of many different lives, he's like a French Charles Dickens.  (Except that it would be Dickens who was an English Victor Hugo.)  Characters come from all over France and from all walks of life: Jean Valjean, the convict-turned-"saint"; Fantine, the miserable prostitute, and her daughter Cosette; Javert, the relentless hound of a police inspector; Marius Pontmercy, a dreamer; Enjolras, the visionary leader of a band of republicans; Thernardier, a certifiable creep; Eponine and Gavroche, Thernardier's children.  These are the main players, who emerge complete from the pages.

In fact, although Jean Valjean is a nuanced character, he is hardly even the main character for the majority of the novel.  After the infamous "hump" in the story, in which Hugo tells in painful detail all about him, Marius is the primary narrator; Gavroche, a young boy living on the streets of Paris, also gets a fair share of this page-time.  In this section Jean Valjean moves to the background, seen through other characters' eyes, until Hugo returns to him after the fall of the barricades. 

Of the good characters, I think I would class Enjolras as my favorite.  He is something of an odd choice, as he doesn't play as major a role as Marius or Cosette or Gavroche; but I still liked him and found him an intriguing character, because he is so very cold and unapproachable.  (I seem to like unapproachable, as evidenced by my liking for Uncas in The Last of the Mohicans.)  As for Jean Valjean, while I sympathized with him in a detached way, his character never fully grabbed me.  Perhaps because he had a tendency to lie down and be a doormat, and I always want to grab character-doormats and shake them.  Marius and Cosette - well, I like a good romance as much as the next gal, but I confess I had a strong to desire to knock their heads together and tell them to wake up and smell the gunpowder.

Among the villains, there were really only two of any importance: Thernardier and Javert.  The former was an excellent sneak, I must say, but it was Javert who caught my interest.  He was the perfect villain for a hero like Jean Valjean, a phenomenal villain on any level.  For he was the sort of character who seems at first like a hero: dedicated, scrupulous, upright, just, even humble.  Oddly enough, as I read, Micah 6:8 often sprang to mind; Javert did justice and walked humbly (although not with His God - it would going much, much too far to say that).  But in all that, he wasn't a hero, because he never learned mercy.  This vein through his character made his struggle with Jean Valjean all the more fascinating, and his ending the more apt.

In the end, taking the book as a whole, I did enjoy Les Miserables.  The characters and the plot, woven together until they really can't be looked at separately, were enough to hold me to the pages from laborious start to depressed-but-exultant finish.  But if you read it for yourself, don't anticipate a happy ending.