Defining Character
Here’s a writing question I’ve never heard asked:
What is a character?
Seems important. Every story has at least one; surely, we must have a clear understanding what it is that makes a character a character. And, of course, what doesn’t. Surely, we know what characters do for our narratives. How else can we know what to do with them?
So then…what is a character?
The answer, I think, is subtler than one might guess. To find it, let’s eliminate some misconceptions.
Wrong Answers
CHARACTERS ARE THE PEOPLE IN A STORY.
Of course this is wrong. Obviously. Because characters don’t have to be people. Stories like Call of the Wild, Watership Down, and Winnie the Pooh would lose all meaning under such a definition. (As would many of Rudyard Kipling’s works, and nearly all Pixar films.) Characters can be animals, aliens, robots, and toys; they can be gods, ghosts, or manifestations of human emotion. They can even be abstracts. We’ve seen it in countless stories; characters can be ANYTHING.
And as we shall see, not every human in a story is necessarily a character.
OKAY—HUMAN, ANIMAL OR WHAT-HAVE-YOU—A CHARACTER IS ANYTHING THAT’S SELF-AWARE.
Wrong again. First, though any sentient being CAN be a character, they don’t necessarily have to be. While Buck, as Jack London’s dog-protagonist in Call of the Wild, most certainly is one, you’d be hard pressed to say as much for any of the rampaging dogs in A Christmas Story. Even self-aware humans can exist in narrative without being characters.
Example: Your protagonist wanders through the foggy silence outside an old, abandoned hospital. Decaying brickwork looms over her, and she swears she can see eyes watching from the grimy gloom behind window panes.
As you write this—as your reader reads it—whether or not those eyes belong to real people, they are not ascribed to character; they are setting.
Or as a more concrete example, take the knitting women in the Company office in Heart of Darkness. These women affect neither the plot nor a single character in any notable way. Marlow might as well be passing a painting of knitting women. They, like the eyes in the above passage, are setting. And of course, symbolism. But not character.
Additionally, just as not every being may be considered a character, a work might make characters out of non-sentient objects. Ray Bradbury’s short story, There Will Come Soft Rains tells of an automated house which has survived a nuclear holocaust; it continues to operate long after its occupants have died, slowly breaking down and eventually catching fire. The house is very much treated as a character in this story. We are made to empathize with it. This is not done through anthropomorphization, not by imposing human traits on an object, but simply by creating objects with which a reader can identify.
An ocean-side cliff stands sheer, pale, and alone. It overlooks the island to which it once was attached. Year by year, they drift further apart. A little further. A little further. A little further, still. One day a horizon will fall between them. They shall not meet again.
Though no word in the above passage implies any level of emotion or self-awareness, the cliff is nonetheless written as a character.
ALL RIGHT, I’M GETTING THE HANG OF THIS. SO CHARACTERS ARE THE ELEMENTS IN A STORY WE IDENTIFY AND EMPATHIZE WITH.
No! We don’t have to identify with a character, dammit. We don’t have to empathize with them. Characters can be wholly alien to the reader, or completely unknowable. Stephen King fills his works with such beings: Pennywise, the Overlook Hotel, that crazy turtle god. And while it’s true, well-written characters are typically expected to hold some shade of human nuance, one-dimensional cut-outs like Cap’n Crunch, Skeletor, Tybalt, Jar-Jar Binks, and Mr. Potter ARE still characters.
FINE. I GIVE UP. WHAT IS A CHARACTER?
All right; I guess we’ve danced around it enough. So here it is:
Characters are story elements within which the reader perceives self-ascribed purpose.
Or to put plainly, a character seems to possess objectives and priorities. These may be explicit narrative goals (Rocky Balboa wanting to go the distance against Apollo Creed) or they may be subtle thematic goals.
A typical hammer, for example, has a purpose, but this purpose belongs to someone else. (Most hammers aren’t characters.)
A hammer described as having pounded millions of nails into tens-of-thousands of boards, passed down from generation to generation for over three-hundred years, on the other hand, may well be seen to have its own purpose. It may be That Which Pounds Nails or The Thread Connecting Countless Generations of Carpenters. Such a hammer very well could be presented as a character. Narratives like Dead Man’s Gun and The Red Violin have non-sentient objects with such thematic purposes.
Subtle or overt, what’s key is the person/object’s purpose comes from within.
Another example: a character under an enchantment has fallen into a deep, dreamless sleep. Dead to the world, they have no objectives, no priorities, no self-ascribed purpose, yet they remain a character. Why? Because the reader invokes these things. When we read of someone sleeping who’d normally be awake—who we’ve decided should be awake—we see them as having purpose. The purpose is theirs, even though it’s assigned to them by us.
Self-ascribed purpose is a matter of reader perception, not objective truth.
And THAT is what makes a character a character. Perceived Self-Ascribed Purpose.
Good enough? Or would you like to dig a little deeper?
DEEPER. LET’S GO FOR BEDROCK.
Alright, so now we know WHAT characters are. How about another question: WHY are they?
Why do stories need characters?
(What exactly do they do?)
Before we answer this, let’s make it a little easier for ourselves; instead of calling them “story elements within which the reader perceives self-ascribed purpose” let’s just say characters are elements perceived to want.
So why does a narrative need at least one element that wants? Ask yourself what a story would be like without one?
If a tumbleweed rolling down the road comes to a fork—if it has no interest in where it’s going or how it gets there—if the reader feels no sense of WANT in this windswept wanderer—what matters if it goes left or right? Who cares what happens when it stops?
Yet that’s all that matters in a narrative. That’s all a narrative is. A sequence of events—prospects leading to outcomes. Because X has happened, either Y or Z must result. It’s through characters we are able to rank these outcomes, both as writers and readers. What would have been a flat, featureless series of occurrences becomes a landscape of ups and downs, rise and fall, good and bad. Suddenly it’s vital that Y happens instead of Z, and a character will go to enormous lengths and risk everything to ensure it does.
Because it’s their desired outcome.
There’s a word for this too:
STAKES
And that’s what characters do; they supply a story with stakes.
Okay, good. We know what characters ARE.
We know what characters DO.
Just one more question: WHAT DO WE DO WITH THEM?
Well as to that…
…You’ll have to figure that one out for yourself.