Getting to Know the People You Already Know

Memorists have it hard, when it comes to characters. We may know these people so thoroughly, we unconsciously make them bland on the page.

Years ago, I got an email from one of my students who had a mini-breakthrough about the cast of characters in his family saga. It’s a mixed-up, even dangerous, family, in his view, and the players onstage were very individual, with unique quirks and tendencies, but he knew them so well, he'd not written that individuality onto the page.

Hard enough just to write the story, he told me. Decades later, he was still coming to terms with their effect on his adult life.

And bottom line, many of them were still around. So he’d decided to write what happened, not who’d done it.

Memorable memoir characters

We all have our reasons for blurring out how real people appear on the page. But characters in memoir must be as memorable as those in a good novel for readers to really grasp their importance and impact.

Yes, they are more than familiar to you, the writer. But they are still strangers to your reader.

I suggested this writer built a chart to track the growth of each of his main players, people who mattered to the story. During this (often tedious) chart work, his breakthrough arrived.

Charting the individuality

I have many versions of the character chart I shared with him. On his chart, I asked him to list three to five of the players along the left margin, then create columns with specific questions along the top. For each character, he’d answer these questions:

Favorite item of clothing

A physical habit

A tic

A gesture

Something they long for

Something they fear

As he completed the chart, he realized why certain people in his memoir appeared flat.
"I know them so well," he said, "but I didn't include any of these specific details.” He was amazed by this. “I didn't know how much I was leaving my characters open for guesswork by the reader.”

If the reader has to guess, if they have trouble picturing the person, if the character isn't different from other characters, they may not care about that person in the story.

Bypass your knowing

If the writer can bypass what they "know" about the character, basically treating them as a stranger, they begin to bring in the qualities that cause reaction and engagement by the reader. Because what's obvious to us, because of our long history with this person, is never obvious to the reader.

You can get this insight via feedback. Writer's groups, writing partners, agents, and editors are all helpful at pointing out where characters feel undeveloped. Memoirists can benefit from the same character development exercises that fiction writers use. As my student learned, this doesn’t mean you make up stuff about your familiars. You just learn to present them with vividness and uniqueness.

Your Weekly Writing Exercise

Pretend you're a reporter assigned to interview this person. Imagine asking your character questions--about things you know and take for granted or don't know. Write down the answers you get without second guessing them. Sometimes this taps into subconscious memory and things emerge that are helpful to your book.

Check out these character questionnaires from Writers Write. Spend time with them--you might be surprised at what you've omitted from your writing that winds up on the questionnaire. What did you discover?

Photo by Nathan Anderson on Unsplash