Knowing Yourself and Your Characters (Or Trying to, Anyway)

Well, it’s been a while since I’ve posted anything, but I have a good excuse! Or, actually, a few good excuses. First I was busy with the end of the school year, then I was busy getting married, and then I was in Maui and Kauai for a glorious two-week honeymoon! But now I have returned to moderately calm, regular life for the first time in a while, and here I am back on the blog.

Since we’re in the midst of summer vacation, I won’t have any new student-author interviews for a while, but my students and I had a lot of fun doing the first six interviews (with Amy Rose Capetta, K. A. Barson, Lisa Graff, Trent Reedy, Tara Altebrando, and Maria E. Andreu—check them out if you missed them!). I’m hoping to line up another batch come September!

For now, though, I’m focusing on revising a middle grade novel (which started off as one YA novel and then turned into a very different YA novel before finally shifting into MG). In this revision process, and I’ve been thinking a lot about what it means to know yourself and what it means to know a character.

Us about to get married!

A few friends and family members who were there when my husband Mike and I got married at the end of June have commented that the wedding and all of the related details and festivities “felt like us.” It made me really happy that they said that. It’s incredibly exciting but not particularly easy to plan a wedding. I wanted the wedding to feel right to us, but I also wanted it to feel right and happy and comfortable for all of the people who are important to us. Ultimately, it felt like we were able to make the wedding a reflection of us as individuals and as a couple, and other people seemed to have a pretty good time, too (or were too polite to tell us if they didn’t).

Us on my first boat dive. Unsurprisingly, I was nervous the night before. It might be hard to tell with all of the stuff covering my face, but sure enough I was happy in the moment.

People throw around phrases like “be true to yourself,” and being true to myself is always a primary goal for me…but I don’t think I’ll shock anybody when I say that it’s an ongoing process to get to know yourself. I like to think I’m a pretty self-aware person, but occasionally other people will surprise me by articulating something about me that I hadn’t quite realized. On our honeymoon, we did some scuba diving, which is something new for me, and Mike noticed that I tend to express nervousness or uncertainty ahead of time with new things but then blow past what I thought were my limits when I actually try the new thing as long as I don’t feel any pressure to do it. I wouldn’t have been able to clearly state that tendency, but I recognized right away that he was right.

As complicated as it is to get to know yourself, it’s even more complicated to get to know a character you’re creating, especially because a writer often has to understand more about a character than a character understands about him or herself. During my MFA program, I learned to ask myself what my main character consciously wants and what she subconsciously wants. I learned to break down what drives her actions—to ask what she believes about herself and the world that causes her to think and act as she does, even if she isn’t aware of the reasons for her behavior. I learned to consider what the character lacks—what kind of void she feels inside, and what early experiences or relationships have carved out that void.

These are all things that we might consider about ourselves and others might help us to realize…but they’re hard questions that would take us a lot of time and emotional energy to figure out. Sure, maybe the stakes are lower when you’re asking these questions about a fictional person, but when you’ve been thinking about a character for many years and are invested in telling that character’s story, it feels important to get them right.

What I find especially challenging about writing is that I can attempt to answer all of the big questions about a character early in the writing process, but many of my initial answers have to change as I get to know the people and story better (or, you know, as I completely overhaul the set-up of a novel a couple of times). So I have to come up with some tentative answers about why my character is the way she is and why she wants what she wants, but then those answers crystallize or shift or even completely change throughout the writing and revision process. If I cling too tightly to my initial answers, the story I’m writing loses its vibrancy, but if I don’t have any answers in mind when I begin, then I have no idea where I’m going.

And aside from all of that, it’s also tricky (but thrilling) to write from a character’s perspective when I know things about a character that she doesn’t realize about herself. One of the things I’m working on right now is making it clear to a reader why a really kind and wonderful boy is interested in the main character in the book I’m currently working on. Now, I love this character even though she is certainly flawed and has some unkind thoughts that she is quick to share in her narrative. I see her from the inside and the outside, so I’m not surprised that this boy thinks she’s special. But I need to make sure that readers see all of the amazing, endearing things about her even though she doesn’t see them in herself yet. Otherwise, they may get tired of her or wonder what the heck other people see in her. Difficult stuff!

Can anyone think of books that do this especially well—subtly help readers to realize things about a character that the character doesn’t yet understand about him or herself? Or has anyone realized important things about a character after spending a lot of time getting to know the character and writing his or her story? I’d love to know your thoughts.