NOTES ON WRITING CHARACTER RELATIONSHIPS
Received a lot of questions on the last essay where I talk about a character’s relationships and impingements, and wished to take a moment to expand and clarify.
1
When we design our character’s relationships we want the relationships to be mirrors into the most significant parts of the character’s self / world as required by the story. By which I mean: one story about a teacher might require a school relationship; another story might not.
2
Relationships are not necessarily defined by conflict. Relationships are bonds, and yes, bonds often produce or are charged with conflict — but occasionally they do not, are not. Relationships (and their bonds) are pretty straightforward: this is my neighbor; this is my coworker; this is my sibling; this is the dude who I pass every day on my run who always tips his hat in a kindly fashion. Some relationships are deep; some are weak.
3
The least effective relationships are simply described without a sense of history or change.
Good relationships have a sense of history (no matter how slight) and (if the story is long enough) are revealed to have changed somehow over time — lending said bond the aspect of dynamism and verisimilitude.
But in my book the only relationships that work on the page are the ones that impinge.
4
An impingement can be conflict but it can also be a request, a responsibility, something about the relationship that causes the prime character to worry. Anything that alters the prime character’s universe in some way, that requires the character to act or to decide not to act — this is an apparitional opportunity, an opportunity for a character to reveal themselves.
Impingement makes the relationship real. Another strange “fact” about characters on the page versus people in real life: characters on a page almost never gain limbic substance / heft (imaginative reality) unless they connect in some way, unless they disturb each other’s universe, unless they impinge. Don’t know why but without impingement the relationship (and by extension the character) will remain in the realm of the abstract, the holographic, something to note, perhaps even admire, but the reader will not feel it in their limbic system, which is where we want to feel characters. Without impingement the relationship, no matter how hard you work on it, will be attenuated, an attenuation that will redound on both the characters, sometimes fatally.
5
How many relationships optimally for a character? Depends on the length and needs of the story. We’ll talk about this more in the next essays on the Two-Body and Three-Body Problem.
6
When it comes to relationships, family relationships are easy, familiar, efficient, potent. No surprise they are ubiquitous, a favorite of writers, playwrights, fantasists, and tv writers.
Efficient: Family relationships don’t need a lot of explanation. They were sisters is justification enough to explain why two very different people are mixed up with each other in fraught ways.
Familiar: for all our diversity, people have stronger clearer assumptions of what family relationships might be compared to other relationships. Colleagues and neighbors mean different things to different people at different times, but at minimum, family relationships tend to be universally recognized as important.
Like character classes in Dungeons and Dragons, family roles come freighted with a prepackaged set of assumptions. Family relationships bring a lot of generalized information, a lot of vibe, that the writer can ride or subvert. As writers we’re always looking for efficient ways to get around the page-life barrier — the amount of work that’s required to convince a reader that these scratches on paper or screen are somehow real enough to qualify as life. When I write they were best friends I have to burn words to explain how and why. When I write they were sisters, I get a lot for very little.
Potent: And as we all know, family relationships tend to have conflict built right into them. Families stick together, but more often than not they fight together, too. As Arundhati Roy says: “This was the trouble with families. Like invidious doctors, they knew just where it hurt.” Which means you get a whole lot of impingement without a whole lot of effort.
Consider Game of Thrones, Succession, and Dune’s titanic dynastic struggles — for all their exaggeration they are also familiar, and for those of us with the standard fractious family package, strangely personal.
Families also reflect — and absorb, to a degree that cannot be exaggerated — a lot of hegemonic ideology. You don’t need to be Freud to understand that families are the ideological forcing house (sorry for the pun) of our societies.
Families allow the writer to deal with (or not deal with) the larger society in which they exist. A writer who wants to rail against their society can do a lot worse than set their story inside a typical or atypical family.
So, efficiency, conflict, ideologically rich — all cool, but there’s one more salience that’s super important. No matter how commonplace they are, how “given” they are for many of us, families are also profoundly fucking mysterious. Why they do the things they do, how people in such similar situations can grow up so different — we can’t stop puzzling over this shit. Not Freud, not Roy, not Ibsen, not Danticat, not Kurosawa, not Hong Kingston, not Ellison.
And because families are both familiar (sorry) and mysterious they never stop fascinating us. I keep saying (for obvious scientific reasons) that we humans are social animals, that our brains our hardwired for social. Well, for better or worse, the basic unit of the social is the family. They are the grammar that shapes our language for belonging.
And, finally, family is evergreen — for real. For all the changes our planet has experienced over these centuries, family — altered, fractured, transformed — has remained something of a constant. Few are the books, no matter how old, high, low, frivolous, serious, that can’t teach us something about family.
That’s it for me. Next time, for real: the Two-Body Problem.
This is some of the best teaching around character and relationships that I've come across. Thanks for it.
I wonder if you can say something about process? You've talked about 'designing' characters and relationships and about a checklist in a past post. At what point in the compositional process do you start thinking in that (if I understand correctly, more left-brained) way?
Many thanks!
Because of your recommendation, I just read Motion of Light on Water by Samuel R. Delaney—full of intense relationships! He is so intimate with his readers; he brought me into all of these very close people in his life. It's non-fiction but the stories have a very fictional feel... I'm sorry I finished the book, I'm sad that it's over. I miss all the characters very much, and his writing. I just ordered three of his SF books from the library.