How to write a book part five: Character and themes

This is the fifth entry in my series on navigating the writing process. To see my first post in the series, click here.

Fleshing out the lead character of a story can be one of the most important—and most difficult—parts of writing a book. This is even more true if a story has more than one protagonist or main character.

As I said in previous posts, the story is intrinsically tied to the arc of your primary characters. It is through their eyes the events are observed and processed and it is them who change or are changed throughout the course of the story. Therefore, it is usually best to determine at least two things about your protagonist before the story begins: who they are—their identity, background, appearance, and so forth—and their arc—or who they are when they start the story, who they are when they end the story, and at least a rough idea of how and why that change occurs throughout the narrative.

At the end of my second post, found here, I wrote about character creation sheets and tools to help flesh out the background and identity of a character. Each tool helps the author ask questions to help the character feel more like a real person than a two-dimensional narrative device. I won’t repeat myself here, but the key is thinking about how people see the character, how the character sees themselves, and how their history shapes who they are and what they do.

I would argue you need to do this first in order to figure out the second part, which is finding how they change. The arc of a character works best when it is tied to what the book is trying to say. If the author wants to communicate that people cannot bury their heads in the sand and cannot go through life ignoring unpleasant truths, then that should be reflected in what happens to the main character. In this example, the protagonist should start as naïve or unwilling to look up at the unpleasant truths of their world, but by the end they “wake up” and acknowledge that accepting and confronting these difficult aspects of their reality is the only responsible way to live. This also means that they should be confronted throughout the story by characters, events, or ideas that challenge their initial view and ultimately cause them to accept their new perspective.

The experience and journey of the protagonist should ultimately be the experience and journey of the reader.

How do you determine what that arc is going to be? Well, ask yourself what you want to say as an author. Why are you writing this book? What truths do you want readers to either learn or accept after reading your work. Theme and character development are closely tied together. Like real life, a book can be complicated and grey. A theme doesn’t have to be clear-cut or definitive. Maybe the theme can be vague, saying something along the lines of “love is complicated.” When the book is finished, readers may take away different things or think about different aspects of love, but they should all realize that love is not always a cut-and-dried happily ever after emotion. Regardless of whether the themes of the book are clear or murky, it is the protagonist who must learn this lesson—and thus they must start out in a different, possibly opposite place than this ending point. If the message is “love is complicated,” than the main character may start out wanting a storybook romance that ends with they and their love interest riding off into the sunset. That way, when they find out by the end of the story that life is never so simple or easy, the contrast between their starting perspective and their ending perspective is clear.

This brings us to one of the most important and often cited rules for writers: show don’t tell. “Showing versus telling” is something you may have already heard of; it is so ubiquitous when learning about storytelling. In essence, you—the author—should never tell the audience something about your character or theme. It gets boring and preachy fast, and it is not engaging to the reader. You show the reader that piece of information through action or dialogue. What does that mean? Think about “The Godfather.” The character of Sonny is a volatile, expressive man with a short fuse. Yet, no one in the story says “That’s Sonny. He has a bad temper.” Instead, we see Sonny spit on an FBI agent’s badge and throw a reporter’s camera to the ground, slipping from happy and celebrating to spoiling for a fight within seconds. We aren’t told Sonny has a temper; we see if for ourselves.

The same goes for themes or a message the author wants to convey. If you want the reader to believe that friendship is important, don’t have a character say that friendship is important—and definitely don’t include in any sort of narration or narrative text. Instead, show how friendship can make the difference in a dire situation by having characters act selflessly and sacrifice for those they care about. Alternatively, you can show how duplicity and selfishness ultimately leads to a self-destructive outcome by a character’s selfish actions or betrayal ultimately leads to their doom.

It can also ensure you aren’t contradicting yourself. In the “Song of Ice and Fire” series by George R.R. Martin, the series upon which the show “Game of Thrones” was based, we see characters repeatedly seek vengeance against those who wronged them. However, we then see that this vengeance is ultimately hollow and does nothing to make the world—or the avenging character—better. In the show, we are told this message by characters, but then we see characters taking revenge and it is treated as a victory or something that the characters take great satisfaction in. Your words and actions can’t contradict themselves if you are relying on actions to convey your message.