Kevin on Kraft: Writing Characters Who Aren’t You

[Note: this post contains the podcast and its show notes along with the article version. Enjoy whichever one connects with you best. If you’re listening on a podcatcher and want the article version, head over to DonnKing.com/112.]

One of the things I enjoy about talking with Kevin Tumlinson is that I can start with a question I think I understand and discover that I was actually asking something bigger.

That happened again in this third installment of Kevin on Kraft.

“Kevin on Kraft?” you ask. If you don’t know about it, here are the first two episodes in this special series on The Alignment Show.

Last time, Kevin made an almost offhand comment that some of his characters are smarter than he is. That stuck with me. Because how exactly do you write a mind you don’t possess? You can research what a physicist knows, for instance, but knowing facts and thinking like that person aren’t quite the same thing.

From there, we wandered into something broader: writing people who aren’t like us. Different backgrounds. Different genders. Different experiences. Even people whose choices we find reprehensible.

And eventually we landed on what may be the real question underneath all of it: What makes a character feel like a human being rather than something the author constructed?

As usual, Kevin and I found a few side roads along the way. We talked about villains, Thanos, Batman, Jack Reacher, Star Trek, watery tuna salad, and why a writer might want access to a time machine.

You know. Craft.

Big Takeaway

A believable character doesn’t have to be like the writer, but the writer has to understand the character well enough to see the world from inside that character’s logic.

That includes villains. It includes characters whose lives and backgrounds differ radically from our own. And it even includes recurring characters who need to grow without changing so much that readers no longer recognize the person they came back to see.