When you read a story, each character should be a whole person. The closer they get to being cardboard cutouts or shadow puppets, the likelier it is that they’re going to stand out, behave awkwardly, and yes, be built on harmful stereotypes. While not every piece of information needs to make it onto the page, the writer should know or imply that a character has all these things: a name, a face, and a life outside the story.

Characters should have names that are real and plausible names for the person they are. Remember: names can signify cultural heritage, assimilation, or just parents liking a word. Not all characters of color – especially ones living in diaspora – need heritage names to signify what they look like and where they come from. On the other hand, a name given to a child of immigrants because it will help them assimilate into their new home also says something important about the character and their background.

Characters should have descriptions that will enable a reader to picture them. This includes but is not limited to skin, hair, and eye color, the way they dress, the way they move, mannerisms, etc. Here are a few examples:

“He was most fifty, and he looked it. His hair was long and tangled and greasy, and hung down, and you could see his eyes shining through like he was behind vines. It was all black, no gray; so was his long, mixed-up whiskers. There warn’t no color in his face, where his face showed; it was white; not like another man’s white, but a white to make a body sick, a white to make a body’s flesh crawl – a tree-toad white, a fish-belly white. As for his clothes – just rags, that was all. He had one ankle resting on t’other knee; the boot on that foot was busted, and two of his toes stuck through, and he worked them now and then. His hat was laying on the floor – an old black slouch with the top caved in, like a lid.” -Mark Twain, Huckleberry Finn

“Her skin was a rich black that would have peeled like a plum if snagged, but then no one would have thought of getting close enough to Mrs. Flowers to ruffle her dress, let alone snag her skin. She didn’t encourage familiarity. She wore gloves too. I don’t think I ever saw Mrs. Flowers laugh, but she smiled often. A slow widening of her thin black lips to show even, small white teeth, then the slow effortless closing. When she chose to smile on me, I always wanted to thank her.” – Maya Angelou, I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings

While not every character needs a description this thorough, they should at least be described to the extent that you’d notice if you had as much contact with them as the other characters in the scene do. For example, you may never see a taxi driver’s eyes, but you’d notice what sort of shirt they were wearing, their skin color, and possibly, depending on the cab, whether they were a smoker.

Notice what these things have in common? They speak to the character’s history. They were doing something before this scene started, and they’ll be doing something afterward, and you should be able to make some reasonable guesses about that. Names, faces and bodies, clothing, the way a character moves and acts, all of these things tell you something about who a character has been and where they’re coming from. As for who they are now, that’s the next section of our checklist.

A quick aside for the last tickbox in this section: if a character is important enough to be described, they’re important enough to do something that furthers the plot of your story, and vice versa. If they’re not doing anything for the story, even if they’re a character the author adores, they don’t belong there. You’ll see this most often in nonfiction, fanfiction, and when two or more authors write closely together. In nonfiction the author may simply have included the character “because they were actually there” not because they did anything noteworthy. In fanfiction and close writing groups, authors will often include characters as cameos because a fandom will notice if they’re not in the story, or because it’s another author’s character and a sweet in-joke to take to their writing circle. In all of these instances, it’s fine to simply edit the character back out of the story (fanfic has different rules, but at least give poor Tony Stark something to do, ok?). If the author is deeply attached to the character and wants to keep them, they need to give them a job to do.

Another part of a character being a whole person is infusing them with, well, character. This section of the checklist is all about ensuring that they have a personality (largely because the next section is going to be talking about whether they’re acting in accordance with that personality). Being able to identify these drivers will help you spot and correct places that characters get, well, out of character.

First, you should know what the character wants. More than anything. Batman wants justice. Imperator Furiosa wants redemption. Natasha Romanoff and Tony Stark want to “work off” the debt of people they’ve killed. Thorin Oakenshield wants gold (so does Smaug). Seeley Booth wants to save one life for every life he took as a sniper. Shrek wants to be left alone. Mirabel’s Abuela wants her family to be safe. Eric Killmonger wants to end oppression of colonized peoples. You’ll note there are heroes and villains on this list – and everything in between. Because everyone wants something, and often the best antagonists are basically decent people who simply want something that’s incompatible with what the hero wants (see: Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog; Les Miserables). Of course, they could also be super evil, or want something antisocial and horrible! But they want it.

The flip side of the coin, of course, is what does the character not want? What do they hate and fear? Is it spiders? Looking foolish? Losing? These things should follow naturally from the character’s history and internal interests, not just because the author thinks it makes the character look good or bad. “I hate injustice” ok cool, but why? What anchors that hate for this character? Do they have personal experience with it, or is it just there because “that’s what good people do”? And look, as much as we don’t want to keep going back to Harry Potter… Snape hated and abused Harry for a reason. And the reason didn’t have a whole lot to do with whether Snape was a good guy or a bad guy, so much as it invoked his history. He hated and abused other kids because he was a bad guy, apparently? Be more consistent with your characters than this.

What friendships and connections does the character have? What kind of people are they comfortable around and who do they seek out – and do those friendships and connections make sense given what you know about the character? How would they have encountered these friends? What common bonds link them? 

Conversely, what enemies (and frenemies) does the character have, and why don’t they get along? Do the reasons given in the story match the behaviors on the page? Oh wait… that’s starting to get into the next section….

Few things will frustrate a reader faster than a character who is not, well, in character. While we’ve tried to give you a little bit of a checklist here, in character tends to be one of those “you’ll know it when you see it” moments. Honestly, few things sum up the “is it in character” question faster than “did Han shoot first?” The answer that a person adheres to for that question depends largely on how they perceive the character of Han Solo before he is confronted by Greedo. Given that he’s at the time sort of in a space Western, should that character adhere to the “never draw first, never shoot in the back” code of conduct prescribed for that format? Or does Han’s status as an outlaw trump the hero’s code of conduct? Is Han Solo at that point in time the kind of person who would take decisive and permanent action to eliminate a perceived threat? What you think of Han’s character dictates which order you think the shots were most likely* to be fired in.

One of the easiest ways to tell if a character is staying in character is, well, look at the first two items on the checklist. In general people left to their own devices will move toward the things they want and avoid the things they dislike, unless there’s an adequate incentive not to. What does this look like? Let’s say one of my favorite things is playing video games. Left to my own devices, that’s what you’ll find me doing. I don’t particularly love working. But I can’t buy video games if I don’t make money, and I can’t get money without working. Boom, now you know why I work, and what I can usually be found doing.

Another way to tell if the character is in character is how they speak. People from backwoods Appalachia don’t just bust out the “forsooth, milady” unless they’re in a specific context. This doesn’t mean that all your characters should speak like caricatures, but it does mean that they should have a vocabulary and vocal cadence that is congruent with their personal context. Figuring out what that is may require you or the author to challenge some personal assumptions about people’s access to education (or just to literature- many people without an extensive formal education are avid readers and have huge vocabularies).

A caveat with speech: keep an eye out for narrators throwing in words that aren’t in the language the story is in just for effect. Similarly, watch out for narrators describing things that they personally would (or wouldn’t) know.

As far as the last checkmark….Look, at the risk of sounding insulting, most people just aren’t that complicated. They don’t wake up and decide to do these incredibly convoluted things for no reason at all. If they have a car, they’re not going to walk 5 miles and climb down a cliff to get to a place with a road and a parking lot. They’re just not. But the good thing about tackling these problems early is that it’s easier to move the world around the characters than the characters around the world. This means if you need a character to do something for the sake of the plot… take their car keys. Change the world so that the thing you need them to do is the most rational straightforward way to accomplish their goal. If you’re editing and you can’t figure out why a character would do X when Y is simpler, flag that for the author to decide between: they can make X the better choice for the character, or just have the character do Y.

As an editor, your job is to keep asking “why wouldn’t they just… ” until the author comes up with a satisfactory answer. It’s not the most fun, but it’ll keep those characters in character.

*Han definitely shot first.

You’ll notice that some of those checkboxes are about not being racist or misogynist or so forth. And some aren’t. We’ve put patterns together because as an editor, if you do this kind of sandwiching you’re likely to have a better response to explaining why the thing the author did replicates harmful stereotypes or perpetuates really tiresome patterns. But you might not. Ultimately it’s up to you and your relationship with the author how you give that kind of feedback. Hopefully they watched last month’s panel on sensitivity reads!

Let’s jump in, shall we?

Naming schemes are great. Ideally when you get a story the author will give you some sense of how they named their characters. Are they all regional names? Do they have meanings that tell the discerning reader something about the character? Make sure that characters fit into the scheme. And if you’re working with a naming scheme in a language or from a culture you’re not familiar with, this would be a great time to subcontract a few minutes of a sensitivity reader’s time to make sure it’s a rational scheme of things that would be used for names for characters from this background and not just “author likes these noises.”

We shouldn’t have to explain why it’s problematic when all the “good guys” or “bad guys” are one color. But we’re going to break that down a little bit because as a neutral statement? That tickbox also lends itself to misuse. Take, for example, some of the critiques of The Rings of Power. ‘Oh well none of the good guys are white, can you imagine if that were flipped?!!?’ First of all yes it would be pretty racist if that were flipped, but discrimiflipping to prove something is discriminatory ignores that discrimination exists in a context of unequal power. So don’t try that. Second of all, wow, don’t treat “white” and “not white” as the two possible categories, because those characters have a pretty wide range of racial and body types. Now, there can be times when having all of one group have a specific background is useful! For example, the setting of your story may control who’s in it. But be careful: you don’t want to perpetuate stereotypes like “stories set in Central America are about drug dealers” especially if your “good guys” are “an innocent white family.” If you’re struggling to articulate why something seems problematic to you in the way characters are grouped by race and role, this is another great time to get in touch with your SR buddy and spend 15 compensated minutes running a story description past them. It’s nothing they haven’t heard before and they probably have some canned phrases and suggestions about it.

There are two kinds of descriptions, although each kind may vary in artfulness. First, there’s the police lineup description: so many centimeters tall, hair color, eye color, skin color. And second, there’s the emotional description: they had the kind of face a child would smile back at, and their eyes were wistful. Notice something interesting about the second one? How did you picture the character? Did they look like the “default person” where you are or where you’re writing? So the problem with this is that writing in English, no matter how artful, carries the weight of hundreds of years of assumptions that it’s writing by, for, and about white people. The less description you have in a story, the more likely it is that the story is either accidentally or deliberately casting those nondescribed characters as white. So make sure that ALL the characters have descriptions that INCLUDE physical attributes.

The classic example of “a villain being bad for badness sake” is the gratuitous rape or child abuse scene. Or the gratuitous use of racial slurs. Sorry to come at you out of nowhere with that one, but… that’s kind of how it feels in a story, too. In general, again, an antagonist is someone that wants something incompatible with what the protagonist wants. You can show the antagonist’s character without these kinds of scenes. And you can show it WITH these kinds of scenes too, with the caveat that the characters suffering the abuse ALSO are whole people. This is one of the places the Marvel movies fall short in storytelling: every death in a story should matter. But in the MCU, dozens and hundreds of people die per movie and people are barely if that much traumatized by it. And we’re not just talking about Thanos. The number of people killed on the bridge in Thor:Ragnarok alone looks like it would fill a football stadium. The number of Sokovians murdered by Ultron. And so forth. While we’re talking about character building, it’s important to respect the wholeness of each and every character. There’s no need to put a character in a story just so they can suffer for the sake of showing a reader that another character is really REALLY bad. Again, that’s not to say that you should never write or edit a story that contains abuse or murder or even genocide. The idea is that it should be there for a POINT, not as a demonstration that some character is the most evilly evil. ESPECIALLY if the abuse has nothing to do with that character’s main goal.

Let’s circle back to descriptions for a second. Descriptions are great, right up until they’re othering. There are reams of words written on why not to describe POC as food, or “exotic” or a host of other things. If you’re not familiar with these principles already, find those resources and read them before you edit a work with characters of color in it. Ask around, including in our Coffeehouse. People will be thrilled to point you to resources!

Speaking of stereotypes: Are all the men barbarians and the women healers? Do all the nonbinary characters look like Ruby Rose or Vico Ortiz? (Sorrynotsorry if you just made your first trip to Vico Ortiz’s Instagram. You’re welcome.) Are “decisive” actions masculine coded and “nurturing” actions feminine coded? Try sorting characters, especially in longer stories, into groups by gender, race, or age, and seeing what OTHER characteristics those groups share. Make sure that your diversity is actually diverse: let characters go against stereotypes, but don’t make them ALL that way. Let characters be mediocre instead of exceptional sometimes. In fact, this checkbox can help backstop your examination of diversity in a story: are there enough characters of any type that one doesn’t have to carry the burden of going against every stereotype?

Finally, we have the congruity check. And this one isn’t as much about the specific character being in character as whether the characters AROUND them are in character. If a character is objectively described as normatively beautiful, they can be insecure, sure, but characters around them shouldn’t be reacting as though they’re plain or ugly. And that’s just the easy, low-hanging fruit. Characters who are abusive shouldn’t be described as loving. Characters who are not in control shouldn’t be described as “reserved” and so on and so forth. Remember, the other characters are seeing the same thing the reader is – they should be reacting the same way.