Compelling Character Development for Nonfiction

If you read much narrative nonfiction or memoir, you’ve probably run into a specific vein of poor storytelling: the Me, Me, Me! approach. These stories have a fleshed out, fascinating central character surrounded by supporting characters who act like puppets. They’re shallow and bland, and they’re only there to make the main character look good.

Especially when writing from personal experience, we can easily focus so intently on what we felt, did, or said in a specific situation that we lose the agency and individualism of the characters around us. For a bad example:

Holidays with Granny Susie were always horrible, and this year’s was a disaster of epic proportions. Nobody particularly likes Granny Susie, and she pinballs between coddling us and berating us—sometimes all in the same breath.

Every year there’s an envelope of cash for each of us (because heaven forbid she know enough about us to actually buy us gifts), and this year’s “generosity” was followed by a charming holiday dinner display of her flinging the gravy spoon at the wall while screaming quite profanely how we were all disinherited and she was changing her will first thing tomorrow.

She also called my sister’s cherubic toddler an “ugly little bugger.” From now on, we’re planning to spend holidays with my in-laws.

Granny Susie is certainly a colorful character, but she doesn’t make much sense. The author provides plenty of examples of Granny’s behavior, but no real insight into why Granny behaves the way she does. Until Granny Susie’s actions on the page make some semblance of sense, the author has sketched only a stock character, a supporting character whose only value comes from her influence on the main character.

Simple characters aren’t inherently bad. If you introduce each new character with a treatise on their childhood trauma, hopes, dreams, and failures, your story will go nowhere fast. But a main character surrounded by stereotypes makes for a self-serving story and does a disservice to the author’s meaning.  What made Granny do those terrible things at Christmas dinner? The author above doesn’t know and takes the lazy way out, painting a loose caricature to avoid the serious work of character analysis.

Writing Real People Believably

Real people, and especially real people from our own lives, are hard to write. Two main problems hound us: capturing the essence of a person on the page and keeping them from wandering about aimlessly. We know so much about these people—their tics, their eye color, the shirt they were wearing when the gravy splattered—that it can be difficult to decipher which pieces are important. Even when we get the external details right, the internal details prove a slippery obstacle. Real people rarely pursue goals in a straightforward fashion as fictional characters fiction do.

How do you sift through all the information about a person, information that is often confusing and contradictory, and shape it into a character your reader can understand? How do you describe Granny Susie in a way that gives your reader insight into her choices without condoning spoon throwing at every major holiday? Two angles for character analysis—the sensory palette and the GOTE sheet—can help you create active, believable characters on the page.

The Sensory Palette

Take some time to visualize your character and craft mental associations for each of your five senses. What visual image reminds you of the person? What aural image? And so on. These can be literal (the smell of Granny’s perfume) or metaphorical (the smell of first blood in a cat fight).

A sensory palette for Granny Susie might look like this:

• Visual: a bomb dropping from the sky

• Aural: fingernails tapping on a table

• Taste: black licorice

• Touch: a smooth, cool marble countertop

• Smell: the musty smell of the money in the envelope every Christmas

Also consider what animal they most remind you of. Does Granny Susie’s abrasive personality remind you of the smallest dogs that bark the loudest? Does her way of peering at everyone remind you of an owl?

How can you use those physical traits to give your reader a stronger image of her? Can the image of the bomb create a threatening tone, or can the tapping of her nails create a sense of tension? Use your sensory palette like an imagery cheat sheet and refer to it when you get stuck.

Let’s spice up the vignette from above with our sensory palette to create a more lifelike Granny.

Granny Susie arrived Christmas morning with all the delicacy of an incoming mortar. The tapping and the peering began within ten minutes of her settling into her chair. Tap, tap, tap. Her fingernails on the table had unbelievable volume.

Tap, tap, tap. And those unblinking eyes! We fumbled through the holiday niceties, just waiting for the first explosion. We didn’t have to wait long.

She caught us crooning over my sister’s cherubic toddler, Junie. “Bah!” she said and peered a little harder. “Ugly little bugger, isn’t she? Better put her to work, let her hand out my presents.”

She used the term "presents” loosely because heaven forbid she know enough about us to actually buy us gifts. Instead, each year we got an envelope full of cash and that musty smell of money that seemed to follow Granny wherever she went. Her “generosity” was always short-lived, though. This year it lasted until the second course of dinner when she flung the gravy spoon at the wall and screamed quite profanely how we were all disinherited and she would be changing her will first thing tomorrow.

She flounced out of the house as well as a woman with mostly artificial joints could flounce, and we all sighed in relief. From now on, we’re planning to spend holidays with my in-laws.

The GOTE Sheet

In the acting tradition I trained in, we analyze characters’ goals, obstacles, tactics, and expectations (GOTE) to understand what makes them tick, and this method works for analyzing the actions of real people too. Conceptually, goals encounter obstacles and require tactics to meet expectations, and this order provides the nice little anagram. But for analysis, it’s often easier to mix up the order a bit.

Goals

A character’s goal is what they want, what they’re willing to fight for. In musicals, characters tend to state these goals clearly, often accompanied by a song and dance routine (“I just can’t wait to be king,” “I want adventure in the great wide somewhere,” etc.). Understanding real human motivation takes more digging.

Goals come in three levels. Characters have overarching goals that tend to be philosophical (I want to leave a legacy my children can be proud of), big-picture goals they pursue throughout the story (I want to earn this promotion), and scene-specific goals (I want to ace this work project to impress my bosses). Notice how all three of these goals play into each other; each smaller goal flows out of the larger goal.

Take the time to study your character’s goals on all three levels, starting with the little pieces. Granny Susie gives everyone piles of cash for Christmas, then threatens to remove everyone from her will during Christmas dinner. What do those pieces tell you about what Granny Susie wants?

Tactics

To dissect the little pieces of goal, it helps to understand tactics. Author David Mamet says, “People may or may not say what they mean . . . but they always say something designed to get what they want.”[1] Tactics fall into two categories: inducing (Granny Susie giving everyone money for Christmas) and threatening (Granny Susie yelling about taking everyone out of her will).

Examined separately, those two actions seem contradictory, but they are simply two tactics for the same goal—Granny Susie’s attempts to control her family with her money.

Obstacles

Obstacles keep the story moving. When your character runs out of obstacles, the story ends. Obstacles also provoke a change in tactics. Granny Susie’s inducing tactic encountered an obstacle. Maybe her family members are all independently wealthy, or maybe they know her money comes with strings attached, but either way, her “generosity” didn’t bring them to her beck and call. Her family’s resilience provided the obstacle and caused her to shift to threatening tactics—disinheriting.

Every moment of your story, each character wants something, and each action is calculated to overcome an obstacle and achieve their goal.

Expectations

Expectations are what the character anticipates happening when they achieve their goal. They give us a glimpse into why the character wants what they want. Maybe Granny Susie expects to fill her final years with schmoozing relatives, or maybe she’s angling for a swankier retirement home. Either way, these expectations keep her motivated in the face of opposition. The stronger the expectation, the more motivation a character has to fight for her goals.

Understanding a character’s expectation helps unravel the one-off choices, the moments and decisions that don’t make sense on the surface level. Granny Susie insulting an adorable toddler may not support her goal of controlling her family, but if she expects to be adored and pampered, a popular child becomes an obstacle.

Putting It on the Page

Now that you understand Granny Susie’s goals, obstacles, tactics, and expectations, you can fill out what actors call a GOTE sheet. Answer these questions from the perspective of each character you’re writing.

Goal

• What do I want overall?

• What do I want in this story?

• What do I want in this scene?

Obstacle

• What stands between me and my goal?

• Who holds the key to preventing or allowing me to reach my goal?

Tactics

• How can I get what I want?

• Who can I induce?

• Who can I threaten?

Expectations

• Why do I expect to get it?

• What will I do when I get it?

Much like the sensory palette, the GOTE sheet provides a lens for understanding Granny and a guide to portraying her honestly. Let’s rewrite the story one more time, this time giving Granny strong goals and focusing on the sensory images that emphasize her goals.

Granny Susie arrived Christmas morning with that lingering smell of old money that wafted around her like a cloud of perfume. The suffocating smell matched her suffocating presence in the room.

Before the door had even closed behind her—and seemingly all in one breath—she launched into her diatribe of the day. Her least favorite neighbor had moved into assisted living (“and good riddance!”), those facilities were a bleep-bleeping scam and should be illegal, and should any of us ever dare to commit her to such a place, she’d see us rot in our graves.

Having settled that score to her satisfaction, she eased into her chair to indulge her two favorite hobbies, tapping and peering. Tap, tap, squint. Her perfectly manicured fingernails on knobby old hands were laughable to watch, but their incessant hammering on the table thrummed like a migraine.

Tap, tap, tap. And those unblinking eyes! We fumbled through the holiday niceties, just waiting for the impending disaster.

She caught us crooning over my sister’s cherubic toddler, Junie. “Bah!” she said and peered a little harder. “Ugly little bugger, isn’t she? Better put her to work, let her hand out my presents.” She used the term "presents” loosely because heaven forbid she know enough about us to actually buy us gifts. Instead, each year we got another gust of her musty perfume: an envelope full of cash.

This year’s “generous” mood lasted until the second course of dinner when someone suggested hosting Christmas at Uncle Jay’s so Granny needn’t navigate as many steps. She erupted from her chair, flung the gravy spoon at the wall, and screamed quite profanely how we were all disinherited and she would be changing her will first thing tomorrow.

She flounced out of the house as well as a woman with mostly artificial joints could flounce. We all sighed in relief, but her stench lingered after her, and we choked on it. From now on, we’re planning to spend holidays with my in-laws.

These two methods of character analysis give you a window into the mind of your characters. Use them to transform flat caricatures into lifelike, compelling people.

[1] Tim Fountain, So You Want to Be a Playwright (London: Nick Hern, 2007) 18.