Every Character Should Be a Mystery

By Jeffrey Getzin, author of “Prince of Bryanae”

You ever meet someone at a party who can’t stop talking about himself, about every detail of his life? How much did you enjoy it? About as fun a root canal? Nothing makes a character grate on your nerves faster than an information dump.

Now think about your favorite characters, either from real life or fiction. What made them such great characters? There were probably a number of attractive traits, but I’ll wager that one trait they all had in common was that we didn’t know everything there was to know about them: they each had some sense of mystery to them and that mystery makes us want to know more, to find out who this person is and why he is doing what he is doing. Full disclosure pushes us away, but mysteries draw us in.

A pair of personal examples.

I’ve written two novels. My first novel, “King of Bryanae”, was an example of how not to write a compelling character. I explained everything there was to know about my protagonist in the first chapter, and as a result, she was a crashing bore. There were some interesting supporting cast members, but the protagonist, oh man, she made a pet rock look exciting by comparison.

Disappointed with my first novel, I tried a completely different approach in my second, “Prince of Bryanae”.

My main character is an elven female soldier named Willow. Willow is sort of a fantasy “Terminator”: she’s humorless, driven, and unyielding. She’s a Cuisinart with pointy ears. Yet when the novel begins, she has recently humiliated herself by freezing in combat: something completely uncharacteristic of her.

Why on earth would such a deadly woman freeze when she presumably was in her element? It has something to do with her childhood and who these particular enemies were. But what?

Well, that’s the mystery I started with. Instead of starting with the answer, spilling everything at the beginning --- “When Willow was a little girl, you see, a bad thing happened and …” --- I started with the question: just what the hell is wrong with her, and why?

The results were extremely gratifying. Friends who were reading the first draft as I was writing it would hound me incessantly for the next piece. Instead of being bored by my character (like in my first book), they couldn’t get enough! Hell, it drove them crazy the way I hinted at the past and only doled out a dollop of backstory at a time, usually in dialog. My readers found it tantalizing, and I couldn’t write the chapters fast enough to suit their demands!

It also gave the story a multi-dimensional arc: not only was there the story arc of the main plot, but there was the implicit secondary arc of finding out what exactly happened to Willow to make her what she is today. That question, raised in the very first chapter, becomes the tonic note for the concerto, and the answer is the resolution tone that brings things to a satisfactory conclusion.

I’m not saying that every character you write should be Clint Eastwood’s Man With No Name, but the next time you create a character, try holding just a little bit in reserve: a secret untold or an action unexplained.  Make your readers want to know more, want to turn that next page to find out what exactly is going on here.

Having tried this once to great success, you can be assured that I’ll be doing this from now on.