I’ve done my share of reading about other writers, reading about writing, and reading the kinds of reviews or essays that analyze writing. That’s all part of the craft. Writing is the laboratory where a writer distills their particular essence. I recently viewed a MindMatters interview with prolific Regency romance novelist Mary Balogh (click the highlighted name for link) in which a discussion of character begins around minute 9 .
One nice thing about this long and thoughtful interview is that it’s conducted by men who were not romance readers but have been converted - at least to Mary’s books! We always hope that anyone who’s discovered romance via one author will eventually branch out to others.
A quote:
“I am not just writing a love story, I am writing about love.”
A romance shouldn’t occur in a vacuum. It’s not two-dimensional Character A and Character B whose only reason for existing is to meet cute, date awkward, screw blissful, and live happily ever after. People don’t occur in a vacuum, and life is four-dimensional. A good romance has a fully-imagined context for its characters to inhabit. The context should include friends, family, careers, living conditions, and culture / society as well as the characters’ personal interests and concerns, plus it needs to account for the passage of time.
Generally, I share Mary’s character-first story process. I may wake up with an idea for a scene, but the first thing I need to do is figure out who the people are in that scene. Why are they there, what are their histories and motivations, and are they in fact people who are involved in a relationship.
A character’s back story is the foundation for everything they do in my fiction. Experience and education form the core of a personality. Choices (if this, then that - or if this, then NOT that) define motivation. Many people in real life, of course, don’t examine their motivations. A few people don’t have the luxury: their lives are so stressful that every action is simply in reaction to some external force acting on them. Most people don’t choose the examined life. It takes time, being quiet, sitting with whatever chatter runs through the conscious mind, considering the context of events, even considering the other people involved in those events to determine how their words or actions influenced an environment or event.
At around minute 40, the conversation turns to accepting a character’s limitations. To writing them with love, in effect. A flawed or antagonistic character must still be fully imagined, or their purpose in the story is suspect. We can return to “classic” romances (I’m looking at you, Georgette Heyer) and make excuses for the racism, anti-Semitism, etc (this is commonly expressed as “but that’s how things were in the 1920s-1930s” to which I say “yes, but that doesn’t mean we don’t call it out in the 2020s”). Or we can look at the stereotypical characters, the cartoonishly biased ethnic or religious portrayals, and ask ourselves why that character is even in the book. We can reconsider the Alpha Male - the “bully hero” of the 1970s-1990s - and wonder why readers found him remotely appealing. Or we can ask ourselves why the author wrote the character that way. Is there in fact a context? Is there an awareness of the character’s history, the forces that shaped him, the historical, social, and cultural influences that produced certain behavior?
A modern romance, meaning one written in the present day, whether it’s set in the contemporary real world or the historical real world or in some not-real world, doesn’t satisfy me unless the characters feel real. I don’t care how clever the plot or how complete the world-building, if I don’t believe in the characters I’m disappointed.
Because the thing is, no writer can be an expert on the full scope of modern life, much less of history. They can only be expert on their characters.
At around minute 50, the conversation turns to attraction. Mary points out that without attraction, you’re not likely to get a romance. But the question of why characters are attracted to each other remains. It’s entirely individual. Entirely character-dependent. Certain people are reliably attracted to certain traits, yet may find themselves intrigued by someone who, on first impression, is quite different from their usual. Whether it’s friendship, a work partnership, or romance, attraction is the first essential component. The writer needs to understand and demonstrate why a romance’s main characters are attracted in order to make the reader believe in the future of that relationship. It can’t be left at “ooh, s/he’s hot.” A reader might not want pages of internal monologue by a character about their feelings, but the author may well need to write those pages in order to distill the essence. The essence, then, has to go on the page, whether in action or dialogue.
Then there’s the aspect of writing resolutions for characters as a way (consciously or not) of working out resolutions for ourselves. I’ve put a few of my characters through some traumatic stuff, but pretty much all of them have to deal with at least one conflict or obstacle I’ve faced myself. To get that done, I need to examine myself. Yep, I’m one of those people; I think of it as a form of therapy. Around 1:15:00 in the interview, they’re talking about truth. Without truth, you can’t achieve real love (romantic or otherwise). On the flip side, if you don’t value someone, you’re more apt to withhold the truth. Value = empathy. A person without empathy will lie about anything, because they don’t care how what they say affects anyone else. The concept of empathy - lovingkindness, understanding, acceptance, plus the ethic of avoiding harm - underlies any good character. Good in a moral sense, and good in the sense of appealing to the reader. A character who’s a terrible person is generally not the kind of person a romance reader wants to get a happy ending.
And yet, there are a lot of truths that can be very damaging - especially the family secret kind of truths. People keep secrets to protect themselves or others. The interview touches on Mary’s Westcott novels, which kick off with the airing of a huge, destructive secret. Historical settings aren’t the only ones that involve secrets, though secrets are much harder to keep in the modern day. Why a character chooses to conceal something significant is something the author really must know. It’s a cheat to have characters discover someone else’s secret if the reader never gets to learn the motivation.
Authors are always asked if characters are based on people they know. For me, characters are mostly based on people I’ve observed. My nuclear family didn’t live close to any of my grandparents, aunts, uncles, or cousins, and my years 9-21 were lived well outside of town. Outside meaning definitely not in walking distance, and also not in local telephone calling distance. These were the days when a long-distance call was reserved for important business, not for chitchat with school friends. So the people I knew best were my own immediate family and my parents’ best friends. If I only wrote about people like them, I’d run out of material fast.
But I went to school: hundreds of subjects to study. I went to college: hundreds more. Graduate school: not that many more, but the ones I met were interesting. Then there were jobs: dozens of new people in each new situation. I moved across the country the year I turned 30, and let me tell you, going from Georgia to California was an education in humanity. Three years after that, I started learning to dance, and through social dancing met dozens more people, most of whom I wouldn’t have met any other way, and some of whom became my very closest friends. I’ve even traveled a bit: vacations in Canada, Mexico, and Hawaii; a college semester in France; visits to major cities from New York to Seattle. More people.
With thousands of observed humans to draw from, plus the bottomless well of research material known as the internet, building a character is mostly a matter of taking the time to do so. It doesn’t require any special talent, only a bit of persistence. Sometimes a character leaps from brain to page. More often, they reveal themselves to me over the course of writing their story.
At the moment, with 29 completed novels, 46 novellas, 11 shorts, and my six-character Edwardian frolic SEXTETTE, I’ve written over 175 main characters. All of them feel very real to me. I’m looking forward to introducing the next new people to my world - and maybe to yours.
Happy reading!