In a post on Writers Helping Writers, Lisa Poisso says how your characters act and react can strengthen or flatten your writing. “Everything in a story depends on what the characters do about whatever the story pushes them up against,” she says. “When readers can no longer see how and why the characters are doing what they’re doing, they lose the thread.”
Poisso identifies three major pitfalls:
- Characters whose reactions are missing or insufficient. In other words, things happen around your characters, but they do nothing in response. “A snappy line of dialogue goes nowhere if it doesn’t get under someone’s skin,” Poisso writes. “When characters don’t react to the conversations and events around them, readers will assume they don’t care. If the characters don’t care, why should readers?” For your POV characters, you have access to their internal and external reactions. For others, you can only show what your viewpoint character can see. You should also adjust your characters’ reactions to fit the stimulus. A character who spills some coffee shouldn’t react as if they’ve been shot.
- Your character’s responses are jumbled. The biggest culprit here is describing a response before the reader understands the stimulus. Generally, people follow a predictable response pattern, Poisso says. First, there is the involuntary reaction, or sense reaction. This is followed by a reflex action, then thoughts. Finally, the character reacts consciously, which you can show with action and dialogue.
- Your stimuli are obscured. “When you’re straining to create suspense, it’s easy to fall into withholding information,” Poisso writes. “This heavy-handed technique attempts to build dramatic tension by hiding or failing to identify the stimulus.” In some cases, this has the result you want. However, this can easily throw your reader out of the story, as they try to figure out what they’ve missed.
