Building Your Fictional Characters' Core: Lessons from 'Se7en' and More

Giving your characters a little inner tension can make them far more compelling.

Earlier this week, I sat down with James L’Etoile on his excellent Authors on the Air podcast to talk (inevitably) crime fiction, “Where the Bones Lie,” the definition of noir, and much more. You can listen to the full clip via the Soundcloud embed below, but it’s also available on all the major podcasting platforms:

There’s one aspect of the interview that I want to dig into: character building. Like so many other parts of the writing process, the approach to building out a compelling character is an intensely personal one. I know folks who begin by writing out a character’s biography, or even just a list of attributes; others start writing the broader story and trust that the characters will flesh themselves out along the way.

As I told James, I often rely on a technique I swiped from Andrew Kevin Walker, the screenwriter who wrote “Seven” (probably the best serial-killer movie ever made, aside from “Silence of the Lambs”) and a whole bunch of other grimdark films, including David Fincher’s recent “The Killer.” Years ago, I discovered an annotated version of the “Seven” script in which Walker said all of his characters have two diametrically opposed impulses; for example, the character of William Someret in that movie is torn between the urge to stay a police detective or retire and flee the city for good.

Whenever I start writing something new, I list the characters and then I list their dueling drives in two columns. This is sometimes harder than it seems, especially with characters who don’t really lend themselves to any kind of duality. However, I stick with it because I think it adds a significant amount of inner tension to any character; even if they don’t outright express what’s bothering them, it tends to come out more subtly in their dialogue and action, because you’ve already internalized their struggle.

This duality is also a good way to fill out micro-bits of character. In “Where the Bones Lie,” Madeline proclaims very loudly and vigorously that she hates Taylor Swift’s music with a passion. However, she also spends a chunk of the book wearing a Taylor Swift t-shirt. Is she being ironic? Deep down, is she actually a fan of pop music, despite her hipster demeanor? What does that say about her true vulnerability as a person? If you keep seeding the narrative with these discrepancies, I think, you get closer to giving your work a literary subconscious, what James Sallis (the dude who wrote “Drive” and other great noir works) once described to me as the “worlds existing beneath, beside, a step ahead or behind, of the visible one.”

During the podcast, I alluded to another character technique that I admire but haven’t really tried. In the writers’ room for “Mad Men,” showrunner Matthew Weiner supposedly dictated that the major character needed a personal self, a professional self, and a secret self impacting their behavior at various moments. In theory, that explains why the characters on that show have such compelling complexity—but it also seems like the writing equivalent of high-wire stunt-work, a ton of effort with a high risk of falling and splattering.

Or you can just start writing and see where the muse takes you, emphasize certain character beats later in the rewrite. It’s really whatever works for you.