Desire, Physicality, Contradiction

In our Craft Capsules series, authors reveal the personal and particular ways they approach the art of writing. This is no. 206.

My debut novel, Freedom Is a Feast—which focuses on four members of a family divided by the chaos of a crumbling country—is set in Venezuela and switches points of view and historical setting often. One of the biggest challenges I faced was to bring these four characters to life in a way that gave them each a unique voice and presence. Whenever I felt stuck with a character, I leaned on three things to shake free: motivation, physicality, and complexity. I found that by investigating character in this way, I could not only create compelling, human, three-dimensional characters, but also lay the groundwork for strong plot, convincing setting, and the all-elusive element of “surprise” readers look for when consuming fiction.

Let’s take on desire first. “What does your character want?” This is one of the most frequently asked questions in any fiction workshop or class for a reason. Knowing your character’s desire in the story does three things (among many others):

1. It creates a bond with readers (we can all relate to wanting something), and it gives them something to latch onto. In its simplest form it creates a question in their mind: Will the character get what they want by the end of the story? It gives readers the most basic of reasons to keep reading.
    
2. It makes it easy to create conflict (another big word in craft). Anything that goes against your character’s motivation, that poses an obstacle to their desire, is immediately interesting. Conflict can exist in the real world (a traffic jam when someone is trying to get to the hospital), or it can reside in a character’s interiority (the memory of a breakup does not allow the character to fully commit to their new partner, even though they love them). Having a clear desire creates plentiful and easy opportunities to create conflict.
    
3. It helps in crafting compelling plot. It provides clarity for the reader, since they have an idea of what the character wants and is willing to find out what happens. It keeps the reader hooked because the writer can easily introduce conflict to the story. And ultimately, It helps in figuring out the ending of a story: does the character get what they want? Do they not? And what are the consequences? In this way plot and character are interwoven.

If desire is the motor of character, then physicality is the car itself. Character description can be important: Describing what they look like or what they wear can paint a picture of the character for the reader that keeps them engaged. But those are the basics. To create memorable characters, we must move from appearance to physicality. I like to think of physicality as how a character experiences the world in their body, and how they move through it. Notice that this definition is dependent on “the world,” and by that I mean whatever exists around the character that they can experience physically: a chair, a punch to the face, the smell of cut grass, bright lights, a honking horn. Here are some ways to capture physicality in your fiction:

1. Focus on the senses! Especially the three every writer uses the least: smell, touch and taste. The more the character experiences the world through their senses, the more real they become to the reader. But that’s not all; the beauty of physicality is that it works two ways. It makes characters more defined, and it does the same for the world around them, helping you create compelling setting in the process.
    
2. Have your character move through spaces. How does your character walk? How much room do they take up? What marks do their bodies leave in the world? Movement, weight, and shape are way more important for characters than the color of their hair and eyes. One trick I’ve often used to reveal character physicality (and bring setting to life) is to place them in a crowded space: My novel, Freedom Is a Feast, is full of packed buses, busy offices, cramped streets full of protesters.
    
3. Have your character interact with objects. Often, settings can seem like painted backdrops in a play. They can be beautiful, exquisite even, but ultimately lifeless. Both character and setting come to life when they interact with each other. So have characters sit in the uncomfortable looking chair, have them climb the tree, have them poked by the cactus. More important: Let us know how it feels to them.

Finally, if there’s one thing that every reader loves it’s to be surprised (in a good way). A story can be competent in all aspects and still leave the reader wanting more. It’s usually something hard to put a finger on, and therefore hard to manufacture in craft, but I’ve found that by adding small but interesting contradictions to a character’s personality one can create delight, interest, and surprise. Think about your character’s defining traits. What small part of their personality can cut against the grain of that? Remember, no one is purely one thing or another, everyone feels themselves the hero of their own story, and all of us have small idiosyncrasies that make us human.

When writing Freedom Is a Feast, I was having issues with Tortuga, the ruthless kingpin of a Venezuelan prison. He seemed one-dimensional, like a stereotypical villain in a B-movie. It wasn’t until I gave him a hobby that he opened up to me as a character. His pure, child-like love for playing the timbales made him real and affected the way I wrote him even in the scenes where he was showing his ruthlessness.

Picking a small contradiction and showing it on the page, with attention to detail and in a way that feels natural to the story, is a great way to round out a character and give your reader a delightful moment of surprise.

Alejandro Puyana moved to the United States from Venezuela at the age of twenty-six. In 2022 he completed his MFA at the Michener Center for Writers at the University of Texas in Austin. His debut novel, Freedom Is a Feast, will be published on August 20 by Little, Brown. His fiction has appeared in American Short Fiction, the American Scholar, New England Review, and other venues; his story “The Hands of Dirty Children” was selected by Curtis Sittenfeld for The Best American Short Stories 2020 (Mariner Books). He lives with his wife and daughter in Austin, Texas.