A Craft Essay by Gerry Wilson
So You Think You Know Your Characters? Think Again.
When I first dreamed up the heroine in That Pinson Girl, my literary historical novel released in 2024, Leona Pinson was a naïve little thing, too innocent for her own good. I invented plenty of things to happen to her, but there was something uninteresting about all that. And if Leona wasn’t interesting to me, she wouldn’t be interesting to readers! I fretted over an important question: what would lift Leona from passive and ineffective to powerful and memorable? What would give her agency?
In this novel, Leona Pinson is a product of her time, place, and circumstances: born into a farm family in north Mississippi during World War I, she’s poor and uneducated. She falls for a young man outside her social sphere, a “town boy” who has graduated from high school and will eventually take over his father’s mercantile store. She bears his illegitimate child, which renders her an outcast in the rural community. She’s also the victim of her brother’s abuse. But Leona as fallen woman and as victim didn’t seem enough to make the reader care about her. I came to understand that Leona needed to become more active and less accepting of her fate. She needed the chance to resist the pressures and expectations surrounding her and her child. She needed opportunities to act—to make decisions that might very well turn out to be wrong—because choice begets consequences, and bad choices and their consequences are often what keep readers reading.
Then there was the character of Raymond, Leona’s brother, who presented a similar dilemma. If there’s a villain in the novel, it’s Raymond. Racist, selfish, abusive, and easy to dislike, he acts, yes; he makes bad choices and does bad things. But the very fact that he’s so villainous created the problem: Raymond was coming across as flat and unrealistic because he lacked even one redeeming quality. Where Leona needed toughening, Raymond required softening of his rough edges. Without more complexity, he was nothing more than a one-note bad-guy cliché.
So, I probed Raymond for vulnerabilities and explored his potential weaknesses. Something needed to penetrate his tough-guy shell. But what? How might I strip him to the bare bones of his character and at least reveal a glimpse of who he is on the inside—or who he could be? What might cause Raymond to feel something besides frustration and rage? What would be enough—not to change him at his core but to take him from a cliché to a believable and somewhat sympathetic human being?
First, I had to confess that I didn’t know Raymond Pinson very well. I had “written into” him several times; the novel originally began with a scene that featured him, but I had not yet learned what made Raymond tick. I knew he was a son who felt unloved by his father; he was “down on his luck” (even the army didn’t want him); he seemed unable to love. I went looking for Raymond’s “rock bottom” and found it in two emotional turning points in the novel: the first, when he is sickened by the actions of the men he rides with at night, terrorizing Black neighbors; and the second when he suffers the loss of something dear to him—perhaps the only thing he’s ever truly loved besides his mother. In those two scenes, I hope the reader can glimpse Raymond’s humanity, the man he might have been, when just an ounce of genuine pity or love for anyone or anything else surfaces. The journey of making Raymond real for me—his “creator”—was a steep but valuable learning curve.
It isn’t a new concept that no person—no character—can be all good or all bad. We human beings are a complex combination of many different traits. We have weaknesses and strengths, and isn’t it often true that in our weakest moments, we discover our strengths?
I believe it’s desirable, even necessary, to make that true for fictional characters, even the minor ones, who must fulfill a reason to be in the story, or we might as well toss them out. Our protagonists especially need life lessons to learn—or not—and opportunities for change, whether they take them or not. (Sometimes the not taking can turn the story in a stronger direction.) They must make choices and set consequences in motion. Above all, they—and also their antagonists—need chances to show how vulnerable they are, how like the rest of us, even the most jaded characters, the “lost” ones, so that readers come away with a moment of understanding: So that’s why he’s the way he is! Is there something of that in me? What would I have done?
Fictional characters, like the rest of us, often can go either direction, toward good or evil. I’d always known that the author has the power to make that happen, but I had to think more about the long trajectory between those polar opposites. The best fictional characters must be as complicated and messy in their humanity as the rest of us. Or more so.
Here are a few “tricks” that help me strengthen a character that feels lacking:
First, if I’m thinking that a character is missing something, I take a break from the manuscript; a break can render fresh perspectives, often about more than character. I put this manuscript away more than once. And then, in the midst of the pandemic, it began to nag at me. Perhaps in the beginning I was drawn back to it because of similarities between the Covid outbreak and the influenza epidemic that figures in the novel (set during the WWI era). But this time, as I read, it seemed I was able to see more clearly where the story lagged, what belonged, and what didn’t. (I’ve learned that if a sentence or a scene nags at me and tells my best-writer-self it doesn’t belong, I should probably trust that instinct.) Staying away from the text for a time helped me assess what I didn’t know about not only the persons on the page but also which events were crucial to the plot.
Besides stepping away, I often do exploratory writing, like shifting a scene into a different character’s point of view. For example, how might Luther Biggs, a mixed-race sharecropper with close ties to the Pinson family, experience a confrontation with Raymond Pinson as opposed to how Raymond might live it? Or I might create background information that never appears in the story but helps me to know the character better.
Another important trick is an “open doors” policy. In a writing workshop some years ago, I had the opportunity for a one-on-one critique with Andre Dubus III. As we talked our way through the opening pages of my novel, he pointed out passages he had marked. “You can open a door here. And here!” he said. I was missing opportunities, he explained, to do the thing we as authors have the power to do in a novel: we have time and space to go deeper, whether it’s an insight into a character’s inner life or a deepening of connections among the elements of a story—character, plot, setting, theme—that makes all of the elements more relevant to each other and thus to the story as a whole. Now I work hard to be aware of the places where I may indeed go deeper. For example, it was easy enough to gloss over Leona’s reaction to her lover’s return home after the war, with a wife. I could name her reactions—hurt, anger, disappointment—and move on. Or I could feel those emotions with her; I could try to create them viscerally on the page with her hiding away in her room, crying while her little son nurses, when her world has just shattered. It takes practice, but I’m learning to recognize those open doors.
And finally — when I’m feeling stuck with a character who seems “off” somehow, when I may be resisting that thought, but deep in my heart, I know the character isn’t doing her job in the story the way she should—I try putting her in a situation where the outcome isn’t a given: she has to make a hard decision. I consider the options that seem available to her, then step back and assess them. Do the options seem in keeping with her character? In other words, are they what readers might expect, given what they already know about her? What consequences will each choice engender? Then I ask: are they too “in keeping”? What’s the most unexpected action this particular character might take in these circumstances? I open that door and go through it to see where it leads. Maybe, like I did with Leona, a character makes what turns out to be a wrong decision that she believes is the “right thing to do,” and that decision has devastating consequences that deeply impact the rest of the novel.
To have a character make an outrageous choice may seem like going down a useless rabbit hole. But what if it isn’t? What if it opens new vistas for that character—indeed, for the entire story—in ways we haven’t yet anticipated? Or maybe, even if we decide the unexpected choice isn’t one she would take, we still learn something new about that character, her backstory, or thought process.
Either way, I believe these exercises aren’t a waste of time. Simply by taking the time and engaging in the process, we will have gone deeper, and we’ll know our characters and stories better. We’ll be better able to render them on the page—more believable, more alive.
Gerry Wilson is the author of an historical novel, That Pinson Girl, and a story collection, Crosscurrents and Other Stories. A seventh generation Mississippian, Gerry frequently draws on her roots and family myths in her fiction. Her short stories have most recently appeared in Persimmon Tree and december magazine. Gerry lives in Jackson, Mississippi. Find her on Substack.
Read more Craft Essays on Cleaver.
