On Writing "Real" Characters

Photo credit: Gene Wilburn on Flickr

Many months ago I read The False Prince by Jennifer Nielsen (review here) and upon completing it, I was hit with a revelation—your point of view character doesn’t have to reveal everything, he can tell the story however he’d like to. I know that doesn’t sound like a particularly stunning revelation—and it’s not like I didn’t know that before, but I’d never seen it executed so well in a first person POV novel, and it made me start to think.

You see, what I really liked about The False Prince was that Sage, the protagonist and POV character, wasn’t entirely honest with the readers about both large and small reveals. He skipped over events and failed to mention specific information, not because he didn’t know it, but because he didn’t want to reveal that information to the readers. The result was rather fascinating, because it felt like Jennifer Nielsen wasn’t writing the story—Sage was, and he was writing it the way he wanted to, rather than the way the author was dictating, and I think for writers that is a result that is highly desirable.

We often talk about character development and getting to know our characters and writing multi-faceted characters with flaws and fears like the rest of us, but in the end it all comes down to this: do your characters feel real or do they feel like characters?

Now I’m not saying it’s a terrible thing if your characters feel like characters, rather than 100% I-might-run-into-this-person-on-the-street-real. There are plenty of characters from successful books that are good, interesting characters that people want to read about, but don’t necessarily feel like you could possibly run into said character on the street. 

Take Voldemort, for example—as far as villains go, I think Voldemort proved to be an interesting, deep (and deplorable) antagonist, and he certainly was strong enough to remain an opposing foe throughout the course of seven novels. Despite that, I’m not sure I would say that he was so incredibly realistic that I could imagine him to be a real person living on Earth. It’s not a bad thing—it’s just where the readers’ suspension of disbelief comes into play.

But then I read novels like The Fault in Our Stars by John Green where the characters are so vibrant, quirky and multi-faceted that they feel like they could truly be real teenagers living among us. Like The Fault in Our Stars isn’t a novel at all, but Hazel Grace’s memoir. The characters feel real.

There isn’t a magical button you can press or sentence you can write to automatically make your characters entirely realistic—it’s usually a combination of a particularly strong voice, realistic thoughts and decisions (and not always good ones) and actual flaws, fears and other humanizing factors. Once accomplished, however, it’s an effect that can truly make your characters stand out and remain memorable, even long after your readers have put away your story and started something else.

Have you ever encountered a character that felt real? What character was it, and how do you think that effect was achieved?