How to Fix a Character Who's Starting to Bore You
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With that out of the way…
What to Do if a Character Stops Surprising You
What do you do when a character loses all of their mystery?
In my book Never Say You Can't Survive, I talk about being curious about your characters, and how wanting to know more about them can help you to enjoy writing them more — the same way that in real life, we are drawn to people we want to know more about.
But sometimes, the curiosity runs out. Sometimes you start to feel like you know everything you need to know about a character, and that's when the character often will become less interesting to write. They’re a known quantity, they've peeled back all their layers. What do you do when a character becomes (Billy Joel voice) too familiar, and there are no more surprises?
This happens. Here's a few ways that I've found to deal with it.
1) Look back through what you already wrote
If you think you know everything about a character and what makes them tick, you definitely don't.
If you look back at what you wrote earlier, you’ll probably find that you left yourself lots of clues and hints about unexplored nooks and crevices in this character's personality and backstory. If you spent a decent amount of time building a character’s internal monologue and developing their story, you’re pretty much bound to find loose threads that you can pull on. I’m often amazed at the stuff I forgot I threw in when introducing a character, which can prove fruitful later on in the character’s life.
And of course, if you decide to introduce a new facet to a character later in the book, you can always go back and add hints about this earlier on.
2) Go back and write the parts you skipped over
Sometimes there’s a scene that just doesn’t feel necessary — you can skip over it, and just tell the reader what happened. And we can just see whatever happens next.
If two characters have a conversation and already I know how it turns out, I might just summarize that conversation in a sentence. Normally, this is a really good idea, because you can move the story forward quickly without getting bogged down.
But I've been amazed how many times I felt at a loss with a character, and the only way to fix it has been to go back and write the scene I skipped, so I can see not just what decision the character made, but why they made it, and what issues they struggled with as they made it. Even if I still don’t end up including that scene in the book, writing it anchors me more in the character’s perspective and lets me know how they feel about the decision they made.
3) Figure out what your character is in denial about.
Sure, your character may be telling you that they're an open book and you know everything about them — but they're probably lying.
It’s worth doing some digging to figure out what they're not admitting, or are actively ignoring about themself and their situation. There's probably a lot of stuff that they (and you) have been sweeping under the rug. Maybe you can confront them with irrefutable evidence that they're wrong about something that happened in their past.
Along similar lines…
4) Figure out the person this character would least like to have a conversation with
And lock those two people in a room together.
5) Give them what they've always wanted
And see how miserable it makes them! And what they choose to do about that misery.
6) Confront them with someone terrible who agrees with them
A fun way to shake up a character’s ideals or personality is to have them meet someone who believes all the same things they do, but is taking those beliefs in a terrible, harmful direction. Make ‘em squirm and try to justify how they’re different from the awful person who shares all their beliefs.
7) Introduce someone who knew them way back when
Meeting someone from a character's past gives us a window into the person they used to be. You might think you remember your childhood pretty well — until you run into someone who was there, and saw a bunch of events from their own vantage point. Or even your young adulthood, for that matter.
It's always a bit of a wake-up call to encounter someone else's memories of your own past. Not to mention, someone who knew you in your youth will know all the most embarrassing stories and possibly where all the bodies are buried.
(You could also just write a bunch of flashbacks to the character’s youth, which could form a separate storyline that builds to some kind of revelation and leads to some action in the present, but that’s a much bigger commitment most of the time.)
Whoever a character used to be, that version of them is still inside somewhere, and it tells us a lot about who they are now — whether they want to admit it or not.
8) Take them at their word.
Maybe instead of exposing what a hypocrite a character is, try believing what they say about themselves. If they act exactly like the person that claim to be — or that you have decided they are — it's going to reveal so many contradictions and cracks, because nobody ever fully lives up to their own legend or fully tries to embody their own beliefs.
Make them go out and tilt with some fucking windmills. Send them into a situation where their clearly-defined and well-established character traits are going to make them do something really extreme, that they won't be able to take back. Make them prove they are who they say they are, or who you've been saying they are — and make it cost them a lot.
9) Get them out of a rut.
I saved the most obvious suggestion for last. If a character seems like they're stagnating, or has no more mysteries to unfold, change up their status quo.
Put them in a starkly different situation, where nothing is familiar and they have to evolve or (maybe) die. Deal them a huge setback, or — see item #5 above — give them an unexpected windfall. This is the quickest and easiest way to make a character change, which is another way of saying “to make them reveal new aspects of their personality.” Throw them into the deep end without a life preserver, possibly with a bunch of sharks.
And as always, don't forget to have fun!
Music I Love Right Now
I was already on a kick of listening to Angie Stone lately, and then she tragically passed away in a car accident over the weekend. I’m so sad I never got to see her perform live, and I only recently started to appreciate how great she was. Her debut album, 1999’s Black Diamond, is pure gold — it reminds me of some other great late ‘90s/early 2000s soul by folks like Eric Benét, D’Angelo and N’Dea Davenport. There’s lots of rich reverb-heavy synth and slow drum machine tracks, with sweet layered vocals. My fav song of hers is probably “Pissed Off”. Here she is doing it live and throwing some Earth Wind & Fire into the beginning:
Also, I did not know until I just looked at Wikipedia that Angie Stone had been a founding member of Sequence, the hip hop trio that recorded the incredible dancefloor-filler “Funk You Up”. Here she is in 1982: