How do fiction writers bring their characters to life? Esty Heller investigates

W

riting fiction is a brutal form of torture.

We spend most of our lives dealing with the intricate complications that revolve around all things human. We deal with the vast and various sensitivities of the people in our lives. We deal with the issues of those nearest and dearest to us. We’re also expected to contend with the issues of people we barely know. I mean, seriously, we deal with ourselves.

That’s more than enough for most people.

Come along fiction writers, and they willingly fabricate lives and sit in front of computer screens (or windows, or kitchen sinks, or desired exotic locations such as the ocean, although that particular location is mainly reserved for fictitious fiction writers), breaking their heads seeking ideas for how to complicate their fictional characters’ lives.

Nuts, I know.

Don’t ask me why I do it.

A primary goal when crafting stories is to get readers invested in characters’ lives. To do so, the author needs to accurately convey the characters’ feelings at any given moment and invite the reader to feel along.

So what we’re really doing, outside of the actual storyline, is breathing life into these nonexistent people’s bodies. We strive to make these people feel so real, their emotions become a physical thing.

Characters’ feelings dictate the environment of the page. But while the reader needs to know what a character is feeling, as the writer, I try to avoid spelling out emotions; I’d rather have the reader deduce them through the characters’ actions and words.

But sometimes, to create the right effect, the writer needs to provide little cues. This is where we plant knots in pits of stomachs, lodge lumps in throats, and sprinkle goose bumps over arms.

The problem is that the go-to phrases for such cues are horribly generic. A knot in the pit of the stomach? I’m pretty sure that’s a capital offense of writing.

I always struggled with the task of coming up with alternative phrases to describe core feelings. The bank of default clichés tends to fly off a writer’s fingertips like basic punctuation. But it’s a flaw. Using those phrases means missing opportunities to weave specificity.

Once, in a desperate attempt to come up with the perfect phrase to describe my character’s impatience without having her tap or drum her fingers, I decided to do some research. Which body gesture shows impatience?

The answer — you could look it up yourself — was tapping/drumming fingers.

No, seriously.

If Google says so, who am I to argue, right?

But the discovery that Google and I (and the whole entire rest of the world) think the same way got me thinking. Those gestures are generic because they’re true. In real life, when a person is impatient, he will tap or drum his fingers.

Why?

I was curious. (And desperate. Even if I had Google backing me up, I still couldn’t litter my page with finger tapping. It’s boring, and, like I said, misses ripe opportunities to weave specificity.) So I started researching those gestures, and I learned that those phrases are hardly about writing technique. They’re about emotional anatomy, the physical sensations across our bodies associated with the vast range of feelings we experience.

It’s a science of its own. Literally.

Well. Character development, move aside. Time to change my PhD.