Are Your Characters Fading from Your Story?
A few tips to keep characters (real or imagined) vivid for the reader
What’s new in my writing room: Honored to be included in the wonderful “How We Spend Our Days” series by author
who has interviewed so many amazing writers (the likes of and Steve Almond and Dani Shapiro!) about a day in their writing life. It’s an inspiring look inside the process and imagination of each working writer, and I loved contributing. You can read about my (not-so-typical) writing day here.A writer was finishing her first memoir. A good writer, a careful one, and her real-life characters were amazingly depicted--people you'd definitely remember, both for good and not.
A recurring challenge she had (one I've seen in my own writing): certain characters kept getting lost. They'd vanish from the story for pages, even chapters. Not because they weren't important or present. But because the writer herself lost track of them.
For instance, her mother. A wicked woman, very vivid in the early chapters, went offstage for about 35 pages in the middle. From her outline, I knew the mother was still around, still making trouble, Why wasn't she more present? As a reader, it bothered me, like a hole or gap in the storyline. When I asked the writer, she figuratively smacked her forehead.
"I forgot," she said. "There are so many people to keep track of."
Problem is, the reader does keep track. And when a character vanishes, the reader notices. This noticing and wondering begins to occupy more and more of the reader's attention, until they are distracted from the story.
Train yourself to catch the fade
Good editors or agents are trained to catch these gaps. I remember when my first novel, Qualities of Light, got accepted for publication. My editor noticed that Chad, a young man important in the story, disappeared for a good chunk of chapters. Not on purpose! I'd just been so occupied with other aspects of the story, I'd forgotten to write him in to the subsequent scenes.
First, know this is normal. Impossible to keep track of everyone without charts and lists, I've found. Here are some pointers you might consider to keep your characters present and real for your readers.
Keep them external
Characters vanish for readers if they are too internal. We learn about people by seeing them in action, not just by hearing their thoughts and feelings.
Long passages or chapters where a character only thinks, remembers, feels can distance the reader. Make them do something, onstage, in front of us, and they grow in vividness and presence.
Make sure physical appearance details recur
How do you describe your character's physical appearance, hair color, gestures, movement/gait, height and weight, clothes, how they stand or sit, what their hands do when they're nervous?
Write a paragraph or two about this. Then comb your chapters to see where (and if) these details appear.
Not usually effective to clump them--that feels like an authorial aside. Better to scatter and repeat. A colleague calls it "plant and return." Readers forget! Remind them often, through a variety of details, what the person looks like onstage so they can visualize and not forget.
Let them describe others
This tip helped me enormously: Let your characters describe other characters.
"Leah noticed that John's eyes looked smaller today, his forehead more pinched."
"Sherm had changed his hair color. Janice wasn't sure she liked the almost metallic silver-brown but she resolved not to say anything mean."
We see characters not only through their own movements and awareness of themselves, but through the other people onstage. It's an effective way of getting details across that might be too self-conscious if a character studied themselves in a mirror ("I notice my brown eyes, too wide set to be pretty, and my limp hair.").
Your Weekly Writing Exercise
Try one of these three tips in a section of your story where one of your characters is MIA. See what difference it makes, and share your thoughts!
Shout Out!
I love to give a shout out to writing friends and former students who are publishing their books and encourage my newsletter community to pre-order or order a copy to show your support of fellow writers. Be sure to let me know if you are a former student and will publish soon (pre-orders of your book are available now), or have in the past two months! Just email me at mary[at]marycarrollmoore[dot]com to be included in a future Shout Out! (I’ll keep your listing here for two months.)
Jim Bonilla, An Eye for an I: Growing Up with Blindness, Bigotry, and Family Mental Illness (University of Minnesota Press), November
I’m a lifelong artist, and I love to inspire and support other creative folk, which is why I write this weekly newsletter. My goal with these posts is to help you strengthen your writing practice and creative life so it becomes more satisfying to you.
I’m also the author of 15 books in 3 genres. My third novel, Last Bets (Riverbed Press), was published in April, after becoming an Amazon bestseller during pre-orders. My second novel, A Woman’s Guide to Search & Rescue, was published in October 2023 and also became an Amazon bestseller and Hot New Release from pre-orders. For twelve years, I worked as a full-time food journalist, most notably through my weekly column for the Los Angeles Times syndicate. My writing-craft book, Your Book Starts Here, won the New Hampshire Literary Awards “People’s Choice” in 2011 and my first novel, Qualities of Light, was nominated for PEN/Faulkner and Lambda Literary awards in 2009. I’ve written Your Weekly Writing Exercise every Friday since 2008.
Mary, thank you again for such a contributory essay. 🙏🙏