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Character Depth and Variety by Mackinley Clevinger, June 16, 2016
An essential part of writing any good story, regardless of the medium of choice, is having a cast of diverse characters that are not clones of one another separated by single, distinct character traits. The real world is made up of millions of people of different races, sexualities, genders, religions, attitudes, personal interests, and thousands of other details for you to build a character from, so make use of the full range of options available to you when you write.
More important, however, than making your characters be more than a baseline-standard (often found to be male and Caucasian in western media) is to also make your characters have depth beyond the surface-trait you assigned to them to make them stand out to the viewer of your work. If a character’s entire existence can be summed up as the ‘gay one’ of the bunch, you’ve made a mistake.
This is a mistake made in real life as much as it is in fiction, where someone’s entire identity is considered to be the single, distinctive trait that someone assigned to them. Viewing a person or character in this way eliminates their complexities and personal attributes to turn them into an easily recognizable stereotype that no one has to think about very much, and can have their thoughts and reactions to events assumed in an instant with no regard for their being an actual person.
Now, this isn’t to say that a person can’t fit into the image of a stereotype to some degree, but there is always more depth to a person than the first thing that comes to mind when you read the word ‘Muslim’ or ‘Trans’. People have complicated lives that they, surprisingly, are always living, so write your characters as such. They aren’t just waiting in the wings for your hero to need their help out of the blue, so flesh out their background a bit and make them real people.
Gay people are not always frequenting nightclubs or hounding after their preferred sex; they’re in long-term relationships or more interested in their line of work than other people, too. Muslims are not only found in a mosque or, god forbid, involved in terrorism; they’re normal people with lives, too. All these people that are not the commonly occurring skin color/religion/gender in media are people too, and that means they do not comfortably fit into the stereotypes that are made about them.
Don’t eliminate the fact that these characters are what they are, either. Say that a character is gay, trans, or a Buddhist; whatever you want the character to be, feel free, but don’t forget to mention that they’re also a baker who likes to do pub trivia on the weekends, and happens to have taken a class in Roman architecture while in college that makes them the go-to person for your hero about to traipse off on a treasure-hunting trip in Rome.
Let these secondary-characters have their own stories, too. Give them depth, flesh out their background, and try to make them something besides the usual crowd you see in most media. If you feel that a group of people are being left out of popular stories, start writing them yourself. If you’ve never really thought about this, and are now realizing that almost all your characters are the same race/gender/religion, then maybe you should try to write people of different cultures, and if it’s hard? That’s good; you’ve found something to work on.
This applies to main-characters as much as it does for side-characters, too. Jewish people have as much right to be the hero as any other religion, even in stories where their religion isn’t a huge factor. How many stories actually have religion as a key factor for a character that is Christian or agnostic? It typically gets mentioned in a round-about way and then doesn’t play a key-part in the plot, so why can’t other faiths get similar treatment and inclusion in secular story-telling?
This same reasoning applies to all other aspects of a character; why can’t the character be queer? Or Asian? Or black, Native-American, Muslim, a woman, trans, anything? Every kind of person has a life and is as capable of having experiences as anyone else, so write about them. You might have to research about that culture to be able to write the character accurately, but becoming more worldly about other cultures isn’t a bad thing.
It’s important to write characters that are diverse and reflect the real world’s wide-range of cultures, but more important than that is to remember that beneath the label you give to a character should be a real, complicated person as opposed to their pre-packaged stereotype. Characters that are well-written are better at attracting the interest of a reader or viewer, and contribute to filling popular media with realistic depictions of cultural groups that are often used as nothing more than token characters that prop up the story of more mainstream heroes.
So if you haven’t already, try injecting your stories with other cultures than the ones you usually run with, and see what comes of it. Chances are, your stories will feel more alive when populated with people that go beyond their stereotypes and are built as real people that the reader can identify with, even if they don’t share the one, glaring trait that would’ve been their entire identity before being given real depth.