Your characters are too real

THE CRAFT ADVICE YOU NEVER HEARD

My mom was obsessed with Young and the Restless. Growing up, every time she started work in the evening (which was often because she was a nurse), it meant she had time to sit and watch the day’s episode. I remember sitting with my mother, her eyes glued to the screen, and asking her why she’s so obsessed with this soap opera.

“Because it’s real, but it’s not too real.”

That’s a true story. I was maybe ten when I posed that question to my mother but for whatever reason (I don’t understand memories sometimes) I remember her answer to this day. More than that, I’ve accepted that answer as one of the core pieces of advice that has helped guide and shape my writing throughout the years.

Here’s the thing: unless you’re writing memoir, your characters shouldn’t be too real. There should be some aspect of your main characters that feel slightly out of whack. And that may sound counter to what good writing is supposed to do, but when I observe the best stories across mediums, this is usually the case.

TV and film do the best job of this. Think of a show like Succession which is HBO’s latest mega hit. They just finished their final season and fans and critics actually agreed on the brilliance of this series. But if we dive deeper into the characters, we’ll see a host of individuals who make decisions or take actions that seemingly make no sense.

For example, there’s a scene when Logan Roy, the head of the Roy household and also the main antagonist throughout the series, urinates in the corner of his son’s office. It was preposterous, over the top, but if you watched that scene, you also must admit that it made sense for Logan’s character. It spoke to the larger concept of marking one’s territory, and Succession is all about marking territory.

That’s just a tiny example. Next time you watch any TV show, I want you to count the outrageous, “this would never happen in real life” moments. It could be obvious like in action movies when they slowly walk away from a building that blows up without a single piece of shrapnel piercing their skin. It can be more subtle like a love letter being found stuck in a bottle washed up on the shore of an ocean decades later, and the person who found it is the person the letters were intended for.

You must remember that writing is entertainment. More than ever, books, film and TV, music, podcasts, video games, newsletters, blogs, are all fighting for the same type of attention. Those lines of separation have been blurred and when you’re entertaining, there must be something about your product that suspends belief, even if it’s just a little bit.

Earlier in 2023, I read this book by an author named Sara De Waard titled White Lies. The protagonist is a teenage girl who constantly makes horrible decisions throughout the book, including a strange scene where she can’t formulate coherent answers during a job interview and runs out of the cafe they were seated at.

Reading some of those scenes made me scream at the pages, but that one degree of disbelief is what forced me, as a reader, to better understand the character and kept me emotionally connected and entertained enough to keep turning the pages.

I’ve applied this to my own writing, as well. In my novel Boys and Girls Screaming, I open the book with a mother walking out of the apartment and abandoning her five-year-old daughter. This five year old is left on her own for two days until her kindergarten teacher finally takes her in. When you start a story with a mother rolling her suitcase out of the house that her five year old daughter still lives in, trust me when I tell you that you’ve earned your readers’ attention, and that’s really what you’re trying to accomplish.

I get that this advice may sound counter to what you currently know about writing. You want things to feel authentic. You want characters to connect to the reader in a real way and that takes creating real scenarios that readers can relate to. And while that is true, it is also true that readers and viewers are consuming your work to escape. They want to feel so sucked into your story that nothing else matters during the time they are consuming (see binging). And I truly believe that if you want to achieve this, your characters can and should be relatable, but they shouldn’t be too real.