Character and Coincidence

Heraclitus said that “Character is fate”; who you are determines what happens to you. If only it were so! The people who fill collection boxes or steal the bills in them would each get what’s coming to them. They don’t. But your characters should.

Tip: A huge part of fiction is good guys finishing first. And bad guys finishing punished.

Yet it’s tricky to make character drive character. How do you reveal that decisions and actions at least influence fate, if not overtly causing it?

Questions drive actions, and questions can drive character motive and behavior.

~ Does luck play a role in character victory or failure?

Randomness is the state of the world, but people can read newspapers or history books for that. Novel readers enjoy reaching the end and being able to trace exactly what determined that ending.

~ Do you subject your characters to dilemma?

There’s no better way to discover what a woman’s made of than asking her to choose between her art and the woman, man, or child she loves. Her decision says everything about who she is. Don’t baby your characters! Make them suffer.

~ Are your characters ironically consistent and inconsistent?

People settle into certain habits— exercising daily or never; working constantly or studying TV like an art form; hating cats or orchids or letting them take over. Yet smokers suddenly quit. Family suddenly replaces frenzied job commitment. In real life, the motive might seem inexplicable. Don’t let that happen in your novel.

~ Are your characters resolute?

At least on paper, the people we admire desire passionately, risk impulsively, and enjoy or despise intensely. That’s another way of saying that they love life and we love watching them love life. Create characters who put everything on the line. They know they might lose, but they’ll never lose for lack of trying.

~ Are your characters flexible?

Heroes adapt. They don’t just keep doing what they did yesterday and a thousand yesterdays before. They don’t just cross their fingers or wish on stars. They use their brains, muscles, and courage to affect the outcome. And how we love them for that.

The world’s certainly unjust enough, and coincidence isn’t particularly interesting. Readers expect novels to supply the causality and credibility that insures a just ending. Why not show how characters achieve the sadness or triumph they deserve.

Great Fictional Expectations

Fiction must fulfill certain expectations.  It needs to feel original, fun, true-to-life, and causal rather than contrived. Otherwise, it’s not surprising—simply disappointing.  At some point, though, fiction must overturn expectations instead of merely meeting them. If readers can predict everything to come, why continue reading?

Readers derive the greatest satisfaction from characters that astonish while remaining believable. Readers enjoy situations that make sense yet yield plausible outcomes no one could possibly predict.

Sounds great, but how do you accomplish that? It’s easier than it sounds. Millennia ago, Heraclitus said that “Character is fate.” In other words, who a character is—at the deepest essence—determines what she or he is capable of—what it’s possible to do or achieve. This observation about human nature generates several choices in terms of plotting plausibly but unpredictably.

a.)    Create situations of such duress that character surprise themselves with their accomplishments, whether physical, moral, or psychological. Often, people can’t even meet their own expectations until circumstances demand that.  If characters surprise themselves, they surprise those reading about their fate.

b.)    Create characters of such complexity that they not only get themselves into complicated situations but also devise complicated strategies for ultimately achieving their goals. Characters shape destiny through their own choices.

c.)    Create an environment that determines fate, whether because of cataclysm, status or even the protagonist’s own dreams (or nightmares). This source of possibility contains more choices than you might think. Whether futuristic, current, or historical, whether urban or rural, fictitious or factual, the trick is how setting impacts every one of your characters—but particularly your protagonist. This is less about geography than a combination of culture, luck, and constraint. How does that generate the surprise of true character?

Tip: Probe the commonplace and familiar deeply enough to summon true yet nevertheless surprising truths.

Each of these solutions requires pre-planning. Genuine surprise arises not from gimmicks but understanding character, plot, and setting so comprehensively that your fiction works from a solid foundation of credibility to yield what feels inevitable, but only after the climax. The very best fiction surprises even its own author.