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114 Part II: Realising That Character Is Everything
Confounding expectations and
creating contradictions
Humans are pretty notorious for making assumptions about other people
based on their initial superficial impression. They forget that the checkout
girl with a working-class accent may be saving up for her PhD, or that a
super-fit Olympic athlete is so afraid of flying that he has to travel ahead of
the rest of the team by rail.
Your characters need to have contradictions to be believable. Remember that
these contradictions may well show more about the other characters through
their expectations of your character than about the character herself.
Write a piece about a character that reveals something unexpected – a characteristic
that’s the opposite of what you expect. For example, read the nearby
sidebar ‘Perfect Penny’.
One great way to depict contradictions and reveal a lot about your character
is by using their attitude towards money: people who are normally tight with
money can suddenly be generous, and the other way around.
How characters handle money is often influenced by their childhoods, their
parents’ attitude to money, whether they were wealthy or poor, and so
on. Money is so fundamental to people’s lives and involves so many daily
I used to know someone at work who seemed
completely in control of her life. She was always
immaculately dressed and had everything ready
for every meeting, with never a sense of being
harassed or rushed. Occasionally, her husband
would appear when she left the office – he was
a highly successful cardiologist, extremely
handsome and charming. She had two daughters
who were high achievers at school, where
they achieved A grades in everything, and went
on to gain places at top universities.
At some stage I lost contact with Perfect Penny.
Then one day an old friend rang me to say that
Perfect Penny
she’d bumped into her in the supermarket. To
her astonishment, Perfect Penny said that she
and her husband had been leading separate
existences for years. They both had lovers but
had waited until the children were grown up
before separating, because they didn’t want
to disrupt their education. Despite this, Penny
revealed that one of the daughters had a boyfriend
with a job on a farm in Australia and had
gone to join him instead of taking up her university
place, while the other one had dropped
out of her physics degree to become a massage
therapist.