John Green on "Creating Characters"

John Green talked today about how to create characters in novels and other text-based forms of storytelling. Green said, “While I do try to think about what a character looks like and what her defining characteristics are — what makes her interesting, what makes her special, what does she value, and how does that system of values lead to the conflicts in her life and that kind of thing — I try not to forget that characters are made of language, and you must be attentive to that. So a lot of the defining characteristics of characters in novels are language-driven and ought to be.

“When I think about character, I like to think about them in relationships to each other. In the same way, I think that’s how humans are ultimately defined. We are our relationships to one another. And a lot of what is interesting about us happens in the context of other people. And I also try to think about conflicts … A lot of what kind of defines character — you often hear this — is hard times … Like you hear that in hard times you find out who your friends really are and you find out the true character of people. I think that’s a bit exaggerated … But it is true that conflict does in many ways define us and define our experiences.”

He also said that while characters need to be real to the reader, they don’t necessarily need to be real to the author. “They remain my own constructions,” he said. “But I need to be invested and empathetic toward the characters in my novel … Even if I don’t like them or I don’t agree with the choices that they make, I need to understand the value of those choices.

“[Writing] is a chance to get into someone else’s shoes. One of the pleasures of having this sort of non-image-driven relationship with the character is that you’re able to emphasize with someone you can’t picture in some ways, I think, better than you’re able to emphasize with people you can picture.”

He said, “I really think it’s helpful to try to divorce yourself from the culture of image saturation and try to understand that the people you’re writing about are not characters in movies, they’re characters in novels. And that those people are going to have sort of fundamentally different ways of being because they’re made out of words instead of being made out of images.”

Read more at John Green on creating characters