Writing characters mindfully

How to be compassionate to all of the characters we create

Photo by Andrew Seaman on Unsplash

Hello friends,

Following on from my post last week, ‘What’s the point in writing stories?’, this week I’m writing an expansion of the reply I gave in the comments to a question that Kate asked:

Seriously, though, what really concerns me is WHAT I write. You would like us to write stories from a place of love and connection, and I totally get that in this world of hatred, greed and, frankly, bewildering selfishness and destruction. The thing is, my preferred genre to read and (increasingly) write, is crime fiction: who/why-dunnits, police procedurals, that sort of thing. (I don’t read nasty, gruesome, violent novels, full of torture and swearing.)

But where does this fit with your vision? Is it enough that I enjoy reading about flawed characters, people who commit crimes, who lie and cheat and steal but who get their comeuppance through the efforts of good, honest, clever people?

As writers, you have to follow your heart. If you are drawn to writing crime, then you should absolutely write it. But that doesn't mean you can't bring compassion to the stories too. Show us why the people who are committing crimes are doing so. Make the reader feel empathy for them.

Writing stories that are ultimately about love and connection doesn't mean we can't write about difficult things. But instead that we show that we're all in this together and yes, some people behave badly and do terrible things, but we should try to understand why rather than vilify them.

So it's about how we explore behaviours and portray characters when they commit crimes, hurt people, and do wrong. We should write them with nuance, kindness and understanding rather than making them 'the bad guy' and that's all they are. All of us are a product of the way our societies are and what I am encouraging us to do in our writing, is to bring us closer together to work through our problems and understand each other, rather than writing stories that create more ‘them and us’ division.

In the novel course I teach, in the module on characters I encourage people to write them using the three Cs. Make them complex, contradictory and consistent.

A mantra that I use in all the workshops and courses I run when we look at character development is that nobody is ever just one thing.

In the introduction to the Tao Te Ching by Lao Tzu, which is the book at the heart of the Daoist spiritual tradition and one I explore in relation to writing fiction in my other Substack, The Tao of Storytelling, translator, Stephen Mitchell, says:

The teaching of the Tao Te Ching is moral in the deepest sense. Unencumbered by any concept of sin, the Master doesn't see evil as a force to resist, but simply as an opaqueness, a state of self-absorption which is in disharmony with the universal process, so that, as with a dirty window, the light can't shine through.

So in applying this to our creation of fictional characters, we can see that our heroes and heroines windows have some smudges and smears of dirt that need cleaning up. Whereas our antagonists windows are filthy with just smidgens of clearer glass where the light leaks in.

By making sure that we apply this knowledge to all of our characters, whether they are the playing the role of the baddie or not, we can ensure that our readers connect to our stories, as the characters we write will seem like real, three dimensional people.

Complexity comes from contradiction. We are all contradictory. I write here about being mindful and compassionate, and while I try my best to live by those ideals, I often fail. Recently I’ve been angry at people and have found it hard, often virtually impossible, to think of them with compassion. I worry about the impending societal collapse as our unsustainable ways of living tip the balance too far. But I fly and drive a car. I create more and more content online that needs to be hosted in huge data centres, which consume inordinate amounts of energy and are manufactured from dwindling resources. After being vegetarian and then vegan for a really long time, I have recently started eating fish, cheese and eggs again, on the advice of three separate acupuncturists. I’m a big old bag of contradictions! What about you? In what ways are you contradictory?

But none of these things make me a ‘bad’ person. Just like you’re not because of the contradictions you live with. So when we’re writing antagonists in our stories, we need to recognise that the contradictions they have don’t make them bad people either. They may do ‘bad’ things but there’s a reason, more than one, that has led them there. So it’s about taking the time to know the characters that we write about, so that we can bring all of that knowledge to how we paint them on the page.

This is how we write stories of love and connection, as even if our characters do wrong and can’t be redeemed, we will be writing them from a place of compassion as we know why they’re behaving in these ways and why they find it hard to change. And when we know that, we can let the light leak in to illuminate the truth. And the truth is that being human is hard. There are many paths we can walk and it’s the exploration of how and why people find themselves on a particular path that can help us to write from a place of love for all us messy humans, including ourselves, as we, and our characters, try to find the right way.

With love,

Mindful Writing Exercise

Use a character in a story you are currently working on and ask them these questions. Write the answers in their first person voice even if your story isn’t told in that point of view:

• What are three things that have happened to you that have defined who you are?

• Name three people you love and the reasons why you love them.

• Name three people you dislike and the reason why you don’t like them.

• What makes you feel happy? What is it about it that makes you feel so good?

• What’s your biggest regret?

• What’s your biggest fear?

• What’s a secret you’ve never told anyone?

I encourage you to use questions like these, and many more, in getting to know all of the characters you write about in stories of all lengths. Recently I ran a short story course and talked about using questions like this in my own writing, a practice I developed over time when I realised I needed more from my short fiction as I wrote and edited it, and in what was appearing in the final versions that were published.

The writers on the course asked to see examples of the short stories I wrote before and after I changed my ways and started working like this. They all spotted the difference in depth and emotional resonance!

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If you’d like to explore these ideas more fully in relation to your own craft, then I am running an online workshop in the new year: Creating Complex Characters. It would be great to see you there.

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