Characters should feel like real people.
The interaction of characters makes a story, and you should aim for the characters to change over the course of the story.
The plot in a good story relates that everything is changing, yet in a perfect story it is a circle that closes a loop. When you close a loop the reader will feel a sense of completion. In real life very few things complete fully, but in fiction we are giving people a snapshot of time. We are relating an event. All stories have a start and an end.
Characters in a story should travel an emotional arc as well and with luck also close a loop. Their failure to something at the start foreshadows their success to do a similar thing at the end. Or grandly fail to do so as part of the story, and there is a strong connection between good dialogue, believable characters and a strong plot.
It is generally a bad idea to let your plot drive your characters. It is better that your characters drive the plot. It is boring to watch a character pushed around by their world. It is far more interesting to have a character that makes things happen.
An example of plot driven action would be when a character should have dispatched another one, but because that character is needed later, there is no dispatching. It feels fake and forced and for most people, will feel a bit annoying even if they can’t put their finger on why.
Good characters need a characteristic that identifies them. It helps simplify the task of identifying who is who in your story (and every character in your story should have a purpose. You’ll notice on video adapted from a book that often several book characters will be condensed to a single on screen character e.g. Drummer in The Expanse television series)
Sometimes you can give your character the hook with dialogue.
Bugs Bunny sidles in with a laconic drawl, “Ehhhh, what’s up doc?”
Steve Bisley’s ‘Goose’ slides calmly to a stop having just survived the mayhem of ‘Mad Max’. When someone asks him what the hell is going on, Goose coolly replies, “Don’t ask me man. I just got here.”
The young, naive Scarlet O’Hara, begins with, “Fiddly dee, war, war ,war, all this talk of war is so boring”, and follows one of the greatest character arcs ever written to unashamedly declare, “If I live through this, I swear I will never go hungry again.”
Whether it’s Juno, Good Will Hunting, or Starship Troopers, the characters deliver so memorable one liners, each perfectly suited to their character.
If you want to study great, pithy dialogue, watch ‘Shaun of the Dead’, or ‘Hot Fuzz.’
The teenage Luke Skywalker on Tatooine, is often maligned and parodied as a whiny teenager bleating about being stuck on a nowhere backwater. He is a whiny teenager stuck on a nowhere backwater. The dialogue fits the character in that moment. It is true to his situation.
In ‘Dune’, Gurney Halleck, knows that the danger is now and an end has come to childhood when he says, “You fight when the necessity arises, no matter the mood.”
Gurney does not walk in and say, “What’s up doc?”, and Luke doesn’t stand on the top of a sand dune and declare, “I will never go hungry again.”
Conclusion
Writing is not a small or easy task. If it were, everyone would do it, but it also isn’t impossible.
I shared a couple of thoughts on an immense topic today and I hope they’re useful.
Stay tuned for more.