By Itto Outini
It’s natural for writers to invest emotionally in their characters. In fact, it’s an indispensable part of the creative process. However, as with all good things, it can be taken too far. Just as doting parents run the risk of smothering their children, writers run the risk of smothering their characters, pigeonholing them and not allowing them to grow. And when the people in your head aren’t growing, you’re not growing either.
Whenever you get so close to your characters that you start imposing our own thoughts, opinions, feelings, and convictions on them, you squander one of the greatest gifts that literature can give: namely, the opportunity to step into another person’s shoes and experience the world through someone else’s mind.
One sign that you’re falling into this trap is when you find yourself writing the same story or character over and over. I call this the default character. The default character typically represents an aspect of your psyche and/or a person in your family or social circle that exercises an outsized influence on your emotional life. It’s helpful to write that default character a few times, ideally in a few different scenarios, since this enables you to explore the tensions that the character represents. But if you find that you’re not able to write anyone or anything else, you might have a problem.
When this happens, the first thing to do is to identify what this character represents for you. Not who: what. It’s important to distance yourself from your default character in order to depersonalize the problem and articulate it in abstract terms.
Now that you’ve identified what your default character represents, the next step is to ask yourself, “What is its opposite?”
Answer that question, and you can begin to deliberately craft a new character who embodies the opposite of your default character. This may take a few tries, and your early attempts will probably turn out like cardboard cutouts rather than as well-rounded characters. And that’s okay. You’re not yet accustomed to thinking about your characters in this way. Keep trying.
Once your new character begins to feel real, you’ll know you’re making progress. However, as long as you’re dealing with a character who represents the opposite of your default character, you’re still writing about the same fundamental issue, just from another angle. In other words, you haven’t really broken free of the cycle. If you’re serious about exploring new territory, the next step is to write a character who has nothing to do with that conflict at all.
At first glance, this advice might seem to fly in the face of the old literary chestnut, “Write what you know.” And it does. Sort of. But remember that these are exercises. Your goal, right now, is not to create a polished final product, but rather to develop new skills. That is, instead of writing what you already know, you’re writing in order to learn.
Here again, begin with an abstraction. Choose an issue that’s not directly related to the issues you’ve been working through with your other characters. One way to do this is to invent a character who represents something that you dislike, but not for personal reasons: for example, someone who holds a political position that you find distasteful, but that doesn’t have much bearing on your personal life. This way, you’re less likely to default to writing a character who represents some aspect of the original issue, but thinking about the new character will still generate enough emotional tension to keep you engaged.
Next, start fleshing out your new character. Create some scenarios that will challenge them, or tempt them, or expose some contradiction in their thinking, or force them to do something that they never thought they would do. Since the character you’re writing is farther from your lived experience, don’t be afraid to supplement these sketches with research.
Again, your early drafts will probably feel underdeveloped, but don’t get discouraged. Keep your eyes on your goal: to make this new character just as complex, just as nuanced, just as alive, and just as human as the default character in whom you’re so emotionally invested. It will take some practice, and it won’t come to you easily, but if you pull it off, you’ll have stepped outside your comfort zone, built new creative muscles, and done something that far too few people in our world know how to do: namely, inhabit the mind of a person who is very, very different from you.
Bio: Itto Outini is an author and co-host of a podcast about literature and the arts, Let’s Have a Renaissance. Her essays and fiction have appeared in literary magazine around the world. In her spare time, she enjoys reading, researching, and building communities.
