When I was a kid, Superman bored me. The dude is invincible! He can fly and see through walls and crush lumps of coal into diamonds! Where’s the fun in a flawless, all-powerful character? I preferred more realistic heroes—ordinary people whose fates were truly uncertain.
In 1975, I snuck into a movie theater to see Jaws. I was 10 years old and traumatized for life when that poor skinnydipper got yanked under the water. But I loved Chief Brody. He was the kind of hero I could get behind. Roy Scheider was skinny and anxious and smoked a lot. He looked a little bit like my Uncle Mike and (like my Uncle Mike) had no business going out on a tiny boat to battle a great white shark. Neither did Quint (washed-up drunk) or Hooper (egghead intellectual). But that’s exactly what made Jaws such a great story! A great story is never a fair fight.
When I started writing Dark Ride, I knew I wanted my main character to be an ordinary guy who has no business being the hero of a crime novel, a guy on a tiny boat (figuratively) trying to stop a giant white shark (figuratively). That’s the kind of lopsided match-up that engages me most as a reader and a writer. I want to keep turning the page to see how the story turns out. I want to have to keep turning the page.
Developing a main character who is both ordinary and engaging can be tough. I wish I had a simple recipe for it, but that’s the challenge: ordinary doesn’t mean simple. A good character, for me at least, needs to be complex. I want some surprises! But – this is where it gets tricky—the surprises have to make sense. If an ordinary character suddenly discovers that, say, they have the power to crush lumps of coal into diamonds, they’re not ordinary any more.
Complexity in a character should be as organic as possible, I think. Flaws, damage, hidden talents, buried emotions, formative experiences—all that should come from a character and not be imposed on a character. As a reader, I don’t love it when I see a writer’s grubby fingerprints on a character. You know what I mean: a story is rolling along and suddenly the character comes down with a case of awkwardly convenient backstory. Palmer hesitated before stepping into the bar. It had been twelve years, you see, since he’d last had a sip of alcohol.
I always try to have a conversation with my character. I write a beat or a scene and we take a look at it together. I say, “What do you think? Does it make sense that you’d have a lifelong fear of the ocean?” If the answer is, “No, man, that’s kind of dumb,” I back off. If the answer is, “Maybe,” then I re-write the beat or scene until I get a definitive yes or no.
It’s such a dumb gimmick to make Chief Brody in Jaws afraid of the ocean. Except it’s not! That’s where the hard, fun work of writing comes in. You can make anything work if you can make it work.
An engaging character is a complex character, but a complex character isn’t necessarily an engaging one. So what else do we need? I wish I had a simple recipe for that too. My highly-inefficient and not-necessarily-recommended approach (see above), is a lot of trial-and-error.
But I also keep a stickie note above my desk that says, “Do.” That’s a reminder, as I write, to put my characters into situations where they’re forced to do, not just think. Active characters, in general, are much more engaging than passive characters.
Even more importantly, I think, action reveals character in engaging ways. I like to run my characters up against obstacles to see how they’ll react, to find out what they’ll do. If you give them a chance, characters, like people, will show you who they are.
So that was some of my thinking behind Hardy “Hardly” Reed, my main character in Dark Ride. Hardly is a good-natured, good-hearted stoner and slacker who is totally unsuited and unprepared for heroics. But when he happens to notice two children in trouble, he can’t let it go—he can’t forget about or give up on those kids. I threw every obstacle at him I could think of, internal and external, and watched to see what he would do. I waited for him to show me who he was.
A few of my favorite recent crime novels with “ordinary”—and highly engaging—characters:
Beware the Women, by Megan Abbott.
Anywhere You Run, by Wanda Morris.
Don’t Know Tough, by Eli Cranor.
The Return of Faraz Ali, by Aamina Ahmad.
Real Easy, by Marie Rutkoski.
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