Characters need to prioritize coherently

Put this one in the “fiction needs to make more sense than reality” file.

Your character wants something. They are actively going after it. What do they choose to do next?

In compelling fiction, your character’s choice will feel comprehensible. They prioritize relatively coherently and go after the thing they care most about. They may well be courting disaster, but we broadly understand why they’re doing what they’re doing.

In clunky fiction, characters’ choices will be out of left field. The monster may be breathing down two characters’ necks, and instead they decide to shoot the breeze with a bunch of lighthearted banter that fills in some information the author thinks is going to be important later. To the reader it makes no sense.

This is a bedrock principle for making your novel believable: characters don’t need to make the right choice, but they need to make a comprehensible choice.

Here’s what I mean.

Characters don’t need to make rational choices, but they need to make coherent choices

Let me be clear that I’m not suggesting that you should turn your characters into logic robots who always dispassionately choose among their best available options. There is plenty of room for characters’ biases, blind spots, and humanity to come into play. They may well be confidently steering themselves straight into disaster.

But we at least need to understand why characters are doing what they’re doing and how they’re thinking through their choices. The narrative voice is a crucial tool to help us understand the protagonist’s decision-making.

Too often writers have a broad Point A to Point B in mind and know they need to get their protagonist on their way to get the story going, so they back into some reasons to make that happen. But if the protagonist jumps straight to an extremely risky or outlandish choice before they’ve tried an easier one or aren’t prioritizing in a way that makes sense, it rarely feels believable.

I call this closing off the easy off-ramps or the “just use the thingamabob!” problem. If you give your protagonist a hyperdrive it’s going to be pretty confusing if you show them deciding to hop on a donkey to cross a desert just because you had some dramatic thirst scenes in mind.

If you want that desert trek to make sense, you need to break the hyperdrive or come up with some other plausible-feeling motivation for why a character would choose an arduous task when an easier approach is staring them right in the face.

Just as importantly, the choices need to feel consistent with what we know the character is like and what they want. If you have a painfully risk-averse character suddenly jumping off a bridge into a raging river, we’re going to need to see that pep talk where they convince themselves to act out of character, and they’d better have a pretty good reason for it.

Don’t make your character dumb or lazy just to create a mystery

A subset of this problem is when something mysterious or dangerous occurs–say, there’s a murder and it’s apparent the protagonist next–and the protagonist doesn’t do a single thing about it. I’m shocked how often I see this in the novels I’m editing!

A killer is on the loose and stalking the protagonist, but they’re in the mood for a meet cute with the new love interest at their favorite bar, aka the first place the killer would likely look for them, so they’re not acting like someone in danger.

Next, instead of lifting a finger to do something, anything to figure out who the killer is and how to protect themselves, they instead have a languid lunch with their pesky but adorable parents because the author wants to fill in some details about How The Protagonist Ended Up The Way They Are.

Horror B-movies with dumb characters running straight into danger have their campy charm, but it’s more difficult to make that work in fiction because we’re so attuned to motivations and thought processes. It’s pretty difficult to invest in a character making incomprehensible choices.

Characters in danger need to act like they’re in danger, and if you want the reader to believe the protagonist cares about something, we need to see them acting accordingly.

Immerse yourself in each character’s vantage point

Too often writers act like they’re puppet masters moving marionettes around and aren’t slowing down to really understand each character’s desires and recent history within a scene. If you just move them around like puppets without stopping to consider if what they’re doing makes sense, they’re going to feel fake to the reader.

Every character needs to have things they want and they need to act like it. Don’t reduce your characters to doing dull and confusing things like asking rote leading questions to facilitate exposition. Show everyone with agency, actively trying to shape the outcomes they want.

I sometimes like to write a journal entry from each character’s perspective to help me get in tune with how the scene looks through everyone’s eyes. This helps ensure that characters are doing and saying things that make sense based on what the reader knows they want and what their personalities are like.

It’s inevitable that you’re going to occasionally get ahead of your characters and think of scenes you want to create that might not flow seamlessly from what they want. But it’s crucial to come up with good reasons for them to act the way they act and lay solid groundwork to get them from Point A to Point B.

In real life, people sometimes make incomprehensible choices. In novels, that’s the kiss of death.

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Art: The Fog Warning by Winslow Homer