How to Write Believable Characters in Unbelievable Situations
Thanks for reading my newsletter! FYI my novel Lessons in Magic and Disaster comes out in August. The wonderful Underground Books in Carrollton, GA just posted this review:
“Charlie Jane Anders casts her most powerful spell here -- transforming the raw ingredients of grief, generational trauma, smear campaigns and transphobia, with queer love, community organizing, and the heart's truest desires to craft a deeply relevant, resonant, painful, and healing masterwork, charged though with unwavering realism and unwieldy magic, and an 18th century literary mystery bubbling up from below!”
Details on how to pre-order (and how to get rewards!) are here.
Sorry I don’t have the spoons to write a brand new newsletter this week, because I’m traveling and visiting family. So I’m writing up my notes from a writing workshop that I taught a handful of times — I hope y’all enjoy!
Writing Believable Characters in Unbelievable Situations
A lot of the most interesting SF and literary fiction nowadays features ludicrous and unreal situations -- everyone from George Saunders to George R.R. Martin includes some wild storylines where ordinary reality goes out the window. So how do you keep your characters feeling like people the reader could meet on the subway, while placing them into surreal worlds?
So in this workshop newsletter, I'll go through some ideas about how to write characters with believable inner lives and worlds, even when everything around them is zarbfully wacky.
I just want to start off with a few caveats:
1) Obviously the notion of “believability” is all in the eye of the beholder, and as always with writing stuff, there are no rules.
2) The whole idea of a "believable" character is potentially a super loaded one, akin to the idea of a "relatable" character or a "likable" character. We've fought really hard to get rid of the idea that characters need to be relatable or likable, because this means putting a lot of constraints on how a character is allowed to be or act. And often, only a very specific, well-worn sort of character gets to be liked, related to, or believed in. So a "believable" character simply means someone whom the author believes in, who becomes a real person in the author’s mind — and whom the reader can be convinced to believe in as well. Even if we’re not going for psychological realism, and the character in question is deliberately fantastical or weird, the author has still thought through how that person thinks and how they process stuff that’s going on. To some extent, when I say “believable,” I mean “consistent” or “recognizable.”
3) The notion of "believable" characters is also kind of problematic because a straight cis white reader is going to more easily believe in characters who are also straight, cis and white. Readers from the dominant group(s) infamously have to get over a higher barrier when it comes to investing in characters and authors from other backgrounds and identities. And really, screw that. So none of this is advice about how to pander to people who can’t see past their own privilege.
4) Different stories have different expectations — a cartoony, satirical, weird story can definitely feature characters who are way more off the wall than in most other kinds of stories.
Even with all that, though, I still freak out all the time about how to make my characters feel like real human beings. And the more outrageous and otherworldly the story, the more I sweat over this.
To some extent this is a suspension-of-disbelief issue. If the characters feel unreal, then the world loses credibility and it starts to feel as though nothing matters. Conversely, characters who feel as if you really know them and could hang out with them in real life can make almost any outlandish plot feel plausible.
As I’ve written before, when I was writing All the Birds in the Sky, I consciously thought of myself as having a bargain with my readers: if they would accept all the outlandish stuff I was throwing into the book, I would reward them by staying mostly focused on the characters and their relationship, keeping the story grounded and personal. I had this idea in my head that for every weird idea I introduced, I had to spend a bit more time on character development and relatable emotions to compensate.
So I do tend to think of character stuff as being in tension with the plot and setting and other, more mechanistic, elements. And the harder to believe the plot or setting become, the more we need to believe in the character(s) — and we need to know that the characters believe in the plot and setting.
So at this point in the workshop version of this talk, I usually would ask the audience to do the first part of a two-part exercise: Write down a one-sentence description of a wild and woolly situation. For example, someone is being chased by giant cupcake robots through a city made of cake. Keep that sentence handy, because we’ll come back to it in a bit.
And now, one more caveat: believing in characters isn’t the same thing as identifying with them. You can believe in a character’s lived experience and worldview without having any sense that you’re like them, or that you would hit it off with them if you met. The characters you identify with are a subset, maybe a small subset, of the universe of characters you’re capable of accepting as real.
So let’s dive in to making your character feel like a real person in an unreal situation. I tend to break this down into four or five buckets.
1. Basic stuff
Grounded details. What’s your character’s favorite candy? Pet peeve? What are some basic character flaws? What’s the thing this person always gets annoyed about, and what makes them feel cheerful? When I wrote my story “Don’t Press Charges and I Won’t Sue,” I spent a lot of time thinking about Rachel’s purse, and her hatred of art curators, and other stuff that had nothing to do with her role in the story.
A lived-in life. In other words, a basic sense of how this person’s life experiences have shaped their approach to the world. What little aches and pains do they have, as a result of old injuries or muscle strain? Is there something that always runs through their head when they’re entering a new situation? How does the weight of everything they’ve already been through alter their perceptions in the present? If they have to carry a heavy thing, are they going to have an aching shoulder? This is also one of a few opportunities to make sure someone’s ethnic or cultural background, or other experiences of marginalization, come through consistently. If they’ve experienced discrimination or abuse in the past, they’ll be constantly bracing for more of it in the present.
A fleshed-out backstory. This kind of goes with the previous point — but it’s also a basic thing that makes a big difference. Any time I’m having trouble fully inhabiting a character, or buying into their reality, I spend more time thinking about who they used to be and how they’ve changed. And what experiences shaped them. I talk more about this in Never Say You Can’t Survive.
2) Internal monologue.
Obsessions and goals. I like a character who has a lot of obsessions and things that they keep thinking about in the midst of a complicated situation. Or someone who has a goal that they keep pushing toward even if the plot is trying to move them in some other direction. I believe in the reality of a situation more if it’s filtered through someone’s idiosyncratic, maybe somewhat unreasonable, perspective. A character who keeps up a running commentary on events that is heavily skewed by their obsessions will always help convince me of whatever is supposed to be going on.
An unwillingness to follow the plot. A ludicrous situation will often sweep your characters up, carrying them along on the weird tide. This makes it all the more important for those characters to be pushing in their own direction, lest they feel like human flotsam. Years ago, I wrote a story called “I’ve Got the Music in Me” — it was a weird satire set in a future where you could be accused of copyright infringement if you got a song stuck in your head. (Because the earworm in your head represents an illegal copy of a piece of music.) Anyway, the main character was just sort of hapless loser who’s drawn into a nightmare, and it was hard to care. So I decided the protagonist had a sick dog that needed to go to the vet — so the whole time he was being interrogated by the copyright authorities, he just wanted to get out of there and get some medical help for his poor dog. It sounds ridiculously simple, but it really helped a lot — suddenly, I cared, and was more convinced of the reality of this guy’s predicament. A character with desires that are orthogonal to the plot makes the plot feel more real.
Obnoxiousness. Just a general observation: your characters can be assholes. You can push this a lot further than you think you can. Their annoying jerk behavior makes them feel more plausible and helps them to push back against all the bizarro shit you’re giving them to deal with. Go ahead and make your protagonist a flaming dickbag, it’ll help.
3 Making THEM believe in the situation
Like I said earlier, the characters have to believe in the reality of their circumstances, especially if it’s weird AF. It’s a transitive thing: if we believe in the characters, and the characters believe that giant monkey ghosts are floating overhead, then we’ll believe in those ghost-monkeys too.
Here are some questions I figure it would be helpful to ask:
What real-life experiences are you drawing on? How is this situation similar to something that happens in the real world? Even if the similarity is somewhat tangential, it can help a lot. Important note: these real-life experiences don’t have to be yours — they can be the experiences of someone you know, or just something you’ve read about.
How does this situation seem normal to the character? Even if it’s kind of nonsensical, is it something they either expected or have gotten used to? Or is there some aspect of the situation that feels familiar, because humans are pattern-spotting creatures?
Does the situation have some internal logic that the characters can grasp — even if it’s not the logic of the “real” world? Again, we’re pattern-spotting creatures. If a character can find some rationale for what’s going on, they can believe in it a bit more.
How does the worldbuilding support this wackness? Basically, the same way your character needs to have aches and pains and preoccupations and quirks, your world needs to have complicated, fussy details that your character is familiar with and relates current events to.
Is this weird situation in some way a metaphor? Not that everything needs to be an allegory or whatever, but if the situation is a metaphor for something real, then it helps for you to be consciously aware of what that metaphor is. And maybe your character notices some of that as well.
4) Trauma, fear and confusion: realistic reactions.
If the freaking walls are melting, this ought to freak your characters out a little — or maybe they’re completely level-headed in the moment, and then they have a meltdown when they’re safe and in a more stable situation. One way or another, we should see how these unlikely events affect your character, or else they’re just not going to seem as real. Like I write about here, you probably need to be able to write about trauma and other intense, embodied reactions in a grounded fashion.
Audiences are so used to bonkers events in their fiction that they get impatient with characters who take too long to accept it or roll with it. We’re a bit jaded, so we want our heroes to be jaded too. But I really appreciate a protagonist who does have a bit of a meltdown when the world is going topsy-turvy.
Most importantly: Allow your characters to have their own reactions to events, not the reactions you think they ought to have. (And here’s where all that stuff about baggage and internal monologue comes into play.)
5) Your character’s position in relation to events
This is partly a chance for me to whine about one of my biggest pet peeves. I get really annoyed when an author seems to be trying to have it both ways — their protagonist is at the center of events and is a pivotal figure in a crisis, but also their protagonist is an obscure nobody who’s treated as if they don’t matter. Sometimes I’ll see a story go back and forth between these two poles, from scene to scene. Or from chapter to chapter. (Sure, there are real-life situations where someone is both essential and marginalized, but in those situations it’s usually pretty clear that people resent depending on someone they look down on.)
Nothing throws me out of believing in a character’s situation faster than a lack of clarity about how much power the character has, and how important everyone else thinks the character is.
Yes, people can be more powerful in one context and less powerful in another. (See: married women in traditional families, who are often powerful within the home, but relatively powerless outside it.) But that still requires a certain amount of clarity about which situations are which, and what that transition feels like. It shouldn’t feel confusing, unless you’re trying to do something extra surreal.
When a character is in the midst of baffling chaos, we need to see them struggle. (Or at least, we need to buy into their perception of what’s happening.) And we can’t see them struggle, or grapple with their circumstances, if we don’t understand how much power they have and how much access they have to information.
This is partly a worldbuilding issue, but also partly about your specific character — the more clear our sense of their place in this society, the easier it’ll be to accept their situation as plausible.
So now let's go back to the ridiculous situation you cooked up before. (See above, with the cupcake robots.) I want you to spend one minute writing down five things about the character in that situation that make them seem more anchored and like a real person. Like: They're late for dinner, they have a toothache, or whatever.
Try to come up with one thing from each of the items on the list above: a grounded detail, a lived-in life, a decent backstory, some internal monologue and goals of their own, some real-life stuff, how they react to trauma/fear, and their relation to the main story.
Final thought: The stuff you worry people will flag is often the only thing they don’t criticize. That’s why you get beta readers!