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Chapter 9: Creating Complicated, Well-Rounded Characters
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Considering Other Ways to
Add Character Depth
The fact is that people aren’t always honest, open or, indeed, very on the ball
about themselves ‒ which makes real life tricky at times, but does provide
fertile ground for your writing. You can use characters’ lies to show truths
about them, write about their secrets to reveal their insecurities or motivations,
and use misunderstandings to complicate them and spice up your
plots.
Employing lies, half-truths and evasions
One foolproof way to make your characters more interesting is to make
them lie. People lie for all sorts of reasons: to escape punishment, to impress
people, to placate them or shut them up, to seduce them, to get or keep a
job, to avoid persecution, to make money, to feel better about themselves, to
make others feel better.
Try this exercise to begin to explore some of the complexities that arise when
characters tell lies:
1. Take a character and have her lie for one of these secrets above.
2. Go on to make that person tell the lie to someone else.
The great thing about lies in fiction is that they tend to escalate. You tell a
small lie – for example, that you’re a couple of years younger than you really
are, that you don’t have a boyfriend when you do, that you earn more or less
money than you really do, that you can’t go to a meeting because you’re ill,
when really you have a hangover, or that you tried to call somebody when
you didn’t. Then you have to keep on lying, because you can’t admit that you
didn’t tell the truth initially. Sooner or later you’re going to trip up or someone
is going to find you out, and you have to face the consequences.
Try out for yourself the way that lies tend to get magnified with time – and
have many unforeseen consequences:
1. Give a small lie to one of your characters.
2. Write three further scenes in which she has to continue to lie, each
one becoming more and more difficult.