How to make a character interesting

It’s hard to create a character that’s truly interesting because there’s a very delicate balance to be struck.

One one hand, you want at least some of your characters to be relatable, and if you’re depicting their travels through a fantastical story in a world full of dragons, intergalactic spaceship battles or – in Falling’s case – a large scale paranormal event – the have to stand in for the audience to some extent, the way they relate to events aligned with those the audience feels they’d have.

That kind of characterisation is what Hollywood specialises in, and no, I’m not going to fall back on a lazy criticism that movies are dumb because they have to appeal to the lowest common denominator – even though that applies in certain genres.

No, the deeper reason is because in even the longest movies, a screenwriter only has so much time to establish a character successfully, and every single aspect of it has to be in context with the plot.

Longer forms of entertainment art like novels and videogames have a finite time to draw and convey their characters too, it’s just that in a purely mechanical sense they have way longer.

Reading a book or playing the main story of a videogame might take you a total of 20, 80 or 200 hours (thanks to both Proust and Rockstar), so there’s a lot more breathing space both for the writer to reveal details about the character and for you to absorb them and build up a picture in your mind.

And so – on the other hand – you can make the characters of novels, games and other longer-form media far more complicated, both for the sake of making them inherently more interesting and to position more of their characteristics in a longer story.

But there’s a risk in going too far in that direction too, in that you can end up making your characters opaque and contrived. Though a lot of his early work in the 80s was very accessible and enjoyable, I always felt Dean R Koontz leaned too heavily into that tendency in later books.

Fair enough if he didn’t want his characters to be regular schmoes, but in the last book of his I read (or tried to), 77 Shadow Street, every character introduction comprised several pages of such way-out quirks and idiosyncrasies I thought he was setting everyone up to be the murderer and I stopped reading, quickly bored with it.

What’s all this got to do with Falling? If you’ve read it (and nobody except me has), you’ll be able to see I put different types of development into different character.

Dale is the closest thing to a cipher for the audience. He reacts to what happens around him rather than actively driving the plot. The one part of his character that sets him apart from the rest of us is the electronic brace reconnecting his spine after his years as a paraplegic, and even though it provides the inciting incident for the story and reveals a pivotal element of the mystery later on, Dale spends much of the story kind of disconnected from their effects.

The character into which I injected the most interesting element (I hope) is Tim, the parapsychologist. Startlingly smart, driven and sure of what he wanted to do with his life since he was a boy, Tim is without doubt the most intelligent and level head in the story – even when faced with some snarling monster or ghostly presence.

To begin with, and as you’d expect of someone who knows everything there is to know about paranormal phenomena and their effects in physics, meteorology, metallurgy, etc, he’s very well educated.

And with a measure of wealth behind him, thanks to his beloved late mother, and an unshakeable thirst for understanding, he’s something that doesn’t exist today and might never: a professional, for-profit ghost investigator in a time and place as secular as Australia in the mid-21st century.

After everything you know about Tim – having watched him pick over the sites of supposed hauntings with his instruments and process it all like a scientist with any other kind of data – you’d also assume he’s the very model of an atheist.

But no. Although it’s not explicitly mentioned about anyone else, Tim’s a committed Christian. I thought that bit of counter programming would make him interesting to begin with, but I hope you agree the reason for his faith is even more interesting.

You might assume a paranormal investigator in a ghost story is Christian because he’s aware of spirits beyond the earthly realm or has maybe even communed with them.

But Tim isn’t that kind of paranormal investigator. I’ve talked about it on this blog before, but today’s interest in the paranormal is too much about psychic powers and spirit mediums for my taste. In the perfect world I imagine it’s about experts with voltmeters, tape recorders and infrared cameras taking readings to try and explain the supernatural like any other kind of scientist, not talk to spirits.

That’s the kind of paranormal investigator Tim is. A bit like Fox Mulder, he wants to believe, but (as anyone with their eyes wide open who knows anything about human psychology knows) he also knows 99 percent of supposed ghosts and hauntings have very prosaic explanations.

Tim’s too smart to stump easily, and he won’t concede hauntings or ghosts are real until he is stumped. We just happen to meet him during the case where it finally happens because there isn’t a prosaic explanation and he is finally faced with a real haunting.

No, the reason he believes in God is his mother.

Tim has the most comprehensive character introduction in the book (aside from Dale, but his character is revealed slowly during the early stages of the novel where he’s really the only character we spend much time with).

We meet him through the backstory of his powerful and corrupt industrialist father and his mother, the young model his father married, treated terribly and routinely cheated on until she gained the self respect and courage to leave him.

Tim’s father tried to starve he and his mother out, denying them any kind of material support despite being a billionaire, and Tim’s mother (who was likewise a believer) used to sit with Tim at nights when he was little in the aftermath of the divorce, both of them praying together that they’d be okay, her telling Tim God would take care of them.

You, I and any other sane adult would assume one of the country’s most powerful and feted business leaders – with all his legal and financial power – has no chance of being bested by a broke single mother. And Tim, despite being only a kid, realised as much too.

And then, despite all the odds, the court system finally found in their favour, his father compelled by law to provide an ongoing sum that wasn’t much more than small change to him but which changed Tim and his mother’s lives.

Tim knew that in a world only of mechanical, materialist cause and effect there was no chance of them winning in a million years. But they did. Something did the impossible, and the only thing he ever attributed it to was the same thing his mother did. God.

I only really get into how (or whether) he reconciles his belief in the material universe with his own personal, spiritual one once or twice in the story, including in a spooky sequence where he’s left wondering if he has measurable, empirical proof of the existence of God, but either way I like to think it gives him a surprising aspect.