Who Cares What Your Character Had For Lunch on Wednesday?

Everything worthwhile takes time and effort. Ironically, the most worthwhile things are the hardest, the longest, the dreariest. And frustratingly, they often don’t fully pay off until the very end, or if they pay off along the way it’s in short sweet pieces.

Take learning the piano, for instance. It’s the night of the grand concert. The pianist steps up, takes a deep breath, and relaxes as their fingers take on a life of their own. The notes flow with apparent effortlessness, and the music dances out as if the pianist and the piano are one. The audience is breathless until the final strain has ended, and then all of their pent-up pleasure bursts forth is rapturous applause. The piece was eight minutes long.

The audience may imagine how much work was put into perfecting those eight short minutes of music, but they will never come close to understanding every drop of effort that it took. If they could only find themselves in the pianist’s shoes, they would see the hours of repetitive practice, the painstaking starting and stopping and restarting and re-stopping as they tried to master the nuances of the piece, the countless practice sessions under the guidance of their mentor, and the years of gradual, careful improvement that, by patience and persistence alone, brought the pianist’s skill to this point.
The audience could not understand as the pianist did that behind that one piece of music lie years of training, the physical training of the fingers in deftness and eloquence, the mental training of the brain in the reading of sheet music and the patterns of notes, and the training of the ear to pick out what miniscule adjustments in volume and timing create a performance thick with feeling, expressive and erudite.

What the audience sees is the final result; the grand concert. They have a vague idea that practice and talent are necessary and must exist, but they are seeing only a small picture of a painstaking and committed  life of piano playing. They are seeing the performance as one sees a square of sky through a skylight, but cannot see that beyond that patch of sky and all around it lie clouds and hills and mountains and fields, trees and rivers and rocks and houses.

And so it is with the writing of a book. What the reader sees is that the character is named Logan. He is an orphan and has low motivation and doesn’t like rice. The reader sees the story unfold, and they feel they have been told a great deal about Logan; after all, an epic adventure has just taken place; an adventure that lasts for 341 pages and takes place over the course of many strenuous, painful months for the poor characters.

But the reader has really only read a brief account of some of the events of seven months in the long life of one character in a large world of other characters. Few of the other months are even mentioned. The reader recalls that the character’s parents died when he was five but doesn’t know how they died. The reader has seen that Logan undergoes a strong character arc as he struggles through various trials and experiences various novelties. But the reader is never told about the character arc Logan went through when his parents died, or the arc Logan was soon to go through as he discovered the difficulties of married life, or the arc he would go through as he came to a mid-life crisis and realized he was developing a bald spot.

The reader doesn’t know that his parents named him Logan after their favorite comedian, let alone that his parents had a peculiar and delightful sense of humor. The reader doesn’t know that Logan has low motivation because he was raised in an uninspired home full of too much indulgence, self-centeredness, and mindless TV programs, and never fed encouragement to live for something more, to discover other countries or other foods or other people outside of those in his day-to-day circles. The reader doesn’t know that Logan dislikes rice because when he was thirteen he was pressured into joining a rice-eating contest which caused him to lose his lunch and his breakfast. The reader doesn’t know what happened to him when he was two or what would happen to him when he turned twenty five or what would happen to him when he was eighty. The reader doesn’t know.

But not knowing doesn’t stop the reader from loving the character. The reader is shown how insecure Logan really is. The reader likes Logan more because that makes him relatable. The reader is informed that Logan has no relatives besides his aunt, and that makes it twice as upsetting when his only living family member dies. The reader is told that Logan is more concerned about the stain on his shirt than the fact that he is in a life-or-death situation. That makes the reader laugh - that and a million other little things that Logan does.

By the end of the book the reader is thoroughly in love with Logan. The reader will think of him every time they hear the name Logan, and they’ll search online for fan art and look up the author’s website and tell their friends how much they need to read the book, all because Logan was such a well-rounded, realistic, relatable character, who acted and spoke and took in information in his own unique, memorable way.

What made him that way? Why did Logan stand out from the characters in so many other books, hurriedly written and hurriedly read? After all, any author could write that their character didn’t like rice. Any character could have adventures. Any author could give a character a random flaw, and why not let that flaw be a lack of drive? Many characters are orphans, and many characters face life-or-death situations. So what made Logan so… Logan?

The answer is found in simply two things: character development and worldbuilding.

When a writer creates a story, they do not simply put words on a page. They create a universe. This universe is inspired by Creation. Creation is complex and limitless and full of details. Each human is given one body, one life, and one window to the world, through which they perceive only a piece of what takes place in Creation. They only see pieces of the people they meet, and when they ‘get to know’ someone, they only really bget to know a bit about them. Humans see in part and know in part.

But what an author must do is to ‘play God’, to see the lives of everyone in their fictional universe and understand the hearts of every character in their story. In order to create a masterpiece in the end, they must start with days and months and even years of work that will never even make it into the final book. And so they begin the toilsome process of worldbuilding and character development.

Now, from the very start the author’s job is to discover. They must find out the character’s name; that is what gives him life. And then they must find out who gave him that name and why and what it means and how they chose it and when and how he feels about it and how his friends feel about it and how many people Logan knows who share his name. From there a whole branch of new questions stem; if his parents are humorous, what made them so? Have they always had a cheerful outlook on life? When did they meet and who were their parents and what were their relationships with their siblings growing up? Are they the oldest or the youngest siblings? And suddenly the author’s mind jumps back to Logan – why doesn’t he have any siblings? Does he wish he had siblings? Are there any people in his life who are like siblings to him? How does not having siblings affect his lifestyle, worldview, and treatment of others? How does it affect his maturity, actions, and attitude?

It is possible for an author to take this stream of questions too far. The author could ask who his friend was and who his friend’s friend was and who his friend’s friend’s friend was, and get lost in a sea of irrelevant characters who won’t affect one word of the story. But there must be a certain degree of wandering off the beaten path for an author. After all, every person’s actions affect another person’s actions in a ripple. It may never make it into the story that Logan had lunch with his friend on Wednesday, and that it was cloudy and he ate a hamburger and gave the pickles to his friend’s dog. It may not even make it into the story that that friend exists. But the author may nonetheless make themself a little chart listing all the foods Logan ate during those seven months, just to keep track of whether their character has a realistic eating pattern or not.

So much detail and planning seems ludicrous, but it is the framework on which the story is built. The tiny scraps of information, trivial dates and times and lists of facts are what come together to build a fleshed-out, deep, well thought-out and truthful character. They are what make the story real.

Just like in a piano recital, the reader sees only the information given in the published book. They are looking through a window. But behind that performance or beyond that window lies a wealth of work and thought and effort and detail put into that character’s universe, all with the goal of building towards one small stack of 341 pages. That is what smoothes out the bumps, eradicates imperfections, adds mood and emotion, and makes the author sound like they know exactly what they’re talking about. That’s what makes the book and its world and its characters so real.