Lucy Barker’s Secret For Creating Living, Breathing Characters

If you think about the characters you’ve met in a novel who’ve stayed with you the longest, they often feel like they have a life outside of the page. They are living, breathing characters with wants, needs and desires—as well as huge, often triumphant, character flaws.

As a fiction writer, how do you create characters that feel vibrant and real? How do you bring a fictional character to life? Our graduate Lucy Barker has an inkling.

Lucy’s debut novel, The Other Side of Mrs Wood, was published to great acclaim in the US by Harper and the UK by Fourth Estate. The novel, which was written on The Novelry writing courses, tells the story of two rival mediums in Victorian London, and comes alive with quirky and original characters. Mrs Violet Wood is London’s premier medium, a woman of supreme ambition whose unique abilities have earned her the admiration and trust of London’s elite. Mrs Wood is indeed a clever and gifted seer—her skill is unmatched in predicting exactly what her wealthy patrons want to hear from the beyond.

But times are changing. First, a nosey newspaperman has begun working to expose false mediums across London. Many of Mrs Wood’s friends—and, yes, some of her foes—have fallen to his merciless accusations. Worse yet, though Mrs Wood’s monthly séance tables are still packed, she’s noticed that it’s been harder to snare coveted new patrons. There are rumors from America of mediums materializing full spirits. How long will her audiences be content with quivering tables and candle theatrics?

Then, at one of Mrs Wood’s routine gatherings, she hears that most horrifying of sounds—a yawn. When a sweet girl with an uncanny talent for the craft turns up at her door, Mrs Wood decides that a protégé will be just the thing to spice up her brand. But is Emmie Finch indeed the naïve ingenue she appears? Or has Mrs Wood’s own downfall come knocking at last?

In this article, Lucy Barker explores the secret to creating living, breathing characters your readers will love.

The importance of truth

I am, first and foremost, a writer of characters. I love nothing more than coaxing a wonderful stranger into a glorious technicolour human being.

It’s one of the absolute joys of writing. A character’s place in your book must serve the story, yes—but for you to love them, root for them and invest hours of time reading about them, they absolutely, absolutely, absolutely must feel real. Your reader must believe that these people exist, that the reason why everything is falling apart is because of their flaws and that the way they can overcome it because of their strengths.

Creating a character is pretty straightforward: they need dimension, depth, good and bad.

But how do we make sure we deliver a character with all those elements that our readers will believe in?

Truth.

Think about the characters you’ve loved. Why do you love them? They can’t all be lovely and funny, or smart and good. No one is just one thing (apart from Melanie in Gone With the Wind who is, if I may say so, unbearably dull and simply there to show just how ghastly Scarlett is).

All the best characters are true. Not based on real people, but true to themselves. Let’s look at Scarlett O’Hara: she’s cruel and selfish, but there’s a vulnerability to her which means that despite making really unlikable decisions, we end up rooting for her. We want her to make better decisions. We hope she’ll be a better person. That maybe this will be the time she stops being such a horror. But Scarlett only changes within her means. Her arc is true to who she is, rather than who we want her to be.

That’s key. Your character is not everyone. They don’t have all the traits, all the time. They’re an individual. What traits they have must be in line with who they are.

I remember my editor going through the editorial changes she wanted to make after she’d bought my book. I’m always up for editorial feedback—I write to be read, after all—but there was one thing she suggested that I just knew Mrs Wood wouldn’t do. It was only a small thing, but it went against who she was. I couldn’t make the change because it wouldn’t be true.

Your character is not everyone. They don’t have all the traits, all the time. They’re an individual. What traits they have must be in line with who they are.

In another book I was working on, now confined to the desk drawer, I had a wealthy Englishwoman flee to New York in the 1870s. She was supposed to go into a brothel (by accident) and stay there to become a Madam. But no matter how many times I tried, how many drafts, how many methods, she simply would not go through that door. It went against all of her moral foundations and she literally clung to the door frame every time I put her in front of it. There was one single occasion where I finally managed to get her inside, but she popped out again as quickly as she could. I really should’ve listened to her because, obviously, that book didn’t go anywhere.

Let your plot serve your character, not the other way round

Of course characters have major shifts in attitude, beliefs, or behaviour, but these things can’t just happen without reason, and it absolutely can’t happen purely for the plot. Because if your reader doesn’t understand or, more importantly, believe why they’re behaving in a particular way, that essential trust between writer and reader is broken. How can we trust this character if she suddenly does a random thing that makes no sense?

We’ve all encountered those thrillers where the whip-smart FBI agent runs up to the roof when an axe murderer enters the building or refuses to accept security when she’s being targeted by a serial killer. And I don’t know about you, but when that kind of thing happens, I just want to throw the book at the wall.

Why? Because everything we’ve come to know about that character is being sacrificed to serve the plot. This character is supposed to be a whip-smart FBI agent who’s had all that Quantico training and life experience, so why is she doing something that even us readers—most of whom I’m assuming aren’t trained FBI agents—know is an absolutely dumbass move? The writer has thrown out everything they’ve told us about this character simply to serve the story, sacrificing all of their character work and our trust in the name of tension.

If a writer cares about their character and the reader, instead of relying on tropes to build tension, they show the character behaving under pressure in a way we’ve come to understand that character would actually behave. In a way that’s true to her.

A great visual example of this in action is in The Silence of the Lambs, when Jodie Foster’s Clarice Starling is being terrorised in the dark of the killer’s house. Ironically, the fact that Clarice continues to be Clarice in this horrifying situation creates even more tension; we’re already invested in her because we’ve spent the whole book getting to know her. Now Clarice is in the worst position of her life, and how she responds fits with the arc of the Clarice we’ve come to know. We see her vulnerability, but we also see the tenacity, the rebellion, the naïve ambition that we’ve come to know embodies her. Our trust isn’t challenged and, as a result, our investment in her survival is amplified. It’s Clarice who continues to drive the plot, not the other way around, and we root for her one hundred per cent because of that.

Mrs Wood in my debut novel The Other Side of Mrs Wood obviously isn’t an FBI agent hunting murderers, but I still needed to make sure that how she behaved was in line with the character I was building. Everything she did—how she spoke to different people, how she responded to threat—had to match her personality. We understand why she sees Miss Finch as an opportunity because we know what she’s scared of.

This meant that when I was writing the climax of my book, I really had to work hard to make sure that how Mrs Wood handled the situation was honest. And that wasn’t easy. Mrs Wood could’ve done anything to answer the book’s question ‘how far will she go’ (and she did in some drafts!), but I had to make her decisions sit with her own moral code, as well as that of my readers, even when those decisions weren’t very smart or likeable. And the only way I could do that, is if I knew what her moral code was.

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Creating characters with truth

To write a protagonist who breathes, you need to know what will wound her.

When you first start writing a character, they’re a stranger to you. And just as it takes a while to get to know a person in real life, Mrs Wood took her sweet time to reveal herself wholly to me. I had a sense of who she was in the first draft, could make a guess at what she would or would not do in any given circumstance, but it wasn’t until I put her to work in the second draft—and realized which of those Nabokov rocks I’d been throwing at her while she was up the tree were going to make her bleed—that I was able to start writing from truth.

To write a protagonist who breathes, you need to know what will wound her.

Mrs Wood went through so many personas to reach that truth. Over the four major drafts, she went from a brittle stranger who talked from the tip of her tongue, snooty, opinionated and not always very likeable, to a woman who had reasons for behaving the way she did, reasons I had no idea about when I first started writing. For example: I only really got into her childhood on the second draft when it occurred to me how important the influence of her mother must have been on her. It was this realisation that made her weakness to ambition clear to me which, in turn, made me understand why she’d trust Miss Finch when no one else did. Before that, it had simply been story. By the time I finished, everything she did was dictated by truth.

Truth is what every one of our characters need and deserve. Without truth, they’re nothing more than cyphers. And if I know Mrs Wood (which I most definitely do), such short shrift would quite simply never do.

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Tips for writing characters with truth

1. Every person matters

Even the fella bringing out the cheese-plate. On The Ninety Day Novel Class at The Novelry, Louise Dean teaches us to map out your supporting cast against your protagonist, which was a game-changer for me and, I’m sure, for you too. So ask yourself what each character in your novel wants or gets from the protagonist. Why are they there? What are they doing? What would happen if they weren’t there? This is essential to do for antagonists, of course, but it’s also a must for your supporting cast too. You want a group of people around your protagonist who bring something to the story, but also to beef up your protagonist’s own depth through conflict, support and challenge. They’re all there to serve the story, but a character who has no other motivation sticks out like a sore thumb. A character who’s there with their own agenda, however subtle or helpful, can do magical things.

2. Use dialogue to develop your characters

When I’m getting to know the cast in my book, I’ll often draft multiple-hander scenes in dialogue alone: it helps me to get the unique rhythm of how a character speaks, whether they get straight to the point or talk in metaphors or say very little at all. It helps me to feel them. These exercises are essentially my characters having a little meet-and-greet and while very little from the session will then go into the final scene, by the end of it I have a better understanding for what makes them them. You might find this blog on how to write dialogue in fiction useful.

3. Pay attention to voice everywhere

When you’re reading other people’s work, pay attention to how other authors create each character’s voice, especially how you hear it in your head. Not just dialogue, but how they show each of their character’s personalities. The quirks and idiosyncrasies that go to create the whole.

4. Find your character hero book

Having a character-driven book for inspiration is priceless. For me, the absolute masterclass in characterisation is Cranford by Elizabeth Gaskell. I first read this when I was about sixteen and was blown away by how fresh this gaggle of middle-aged Victorian women felt—there’s a quiet lushness to the way Gaskell has created them, developing each character through their own subtle (and not so subtle) traits. There’s no labouring the point here, a few carefully chosen words and you know exactly who they are. It’s only on reflection that I realize what a huge impact this had on how I’ve written ever since.

The Other Side of Mrs Wood is published in paperback in the UK on February 15 and in the US on June 25. You can pre-order now. The novel is currently available in hardback, ebook and audio.

For more insights into literary techniques, coaching and a supportive writing community, join us on a creative writing course at The Novelry – the world’s top-rated writing school.