Stop Pitting Your Characters Against Each Other

We have postulated that it's best to start a work with two main characters. We ought really to have six to ten, like most casts in books, plays and films, but let's not dig ourselves in deep too soon. Let's keep with two for now and add later. I'd like to talk about directions our work might take, but before we rush into that, we have two pits to avoid — that almost no one avoids, because it's so easy for writers to go there.

What makes it worse is that I, you, anyone who's well-read, can instantly think of half a dozen classic, famously successful books that indulged in what I'm now going to say we should stay away from. Therefore I must express a caveat: it isn't that these pits are bad, in and of themselves... it's that when they're indulged in by someone who doesn't know how, the consequence is just awful, irritating, masturbatory writing. Which is to suggest, until one gets the hang of writing well, it's probably best to steer clear. Later, with a little
experience, every writer should try their hand, for there's plenty of room to explore there. But if you're reading this because you don't know how to write, well — let's try to get onto safer ground.

And, in fact, ground that's far less travelled.

The first pit is this, in a nutshell: each of our two characters is in conflict with the other. They don't like each other, they don't want the same things, they're trying to kill each other, surpass each other... there are choices. In a thriller, we have the last one standing. In a romance, we have foreplay. In a mystery, we have one in the open and the other in the tall grass. In a drama, we have two spiralling a drain.

We humans are naturally competitive and so this seems like a good idea: lots of arguments or drag out fights, motivations to one-up the other and there's momentum to be found in each racing against the other towards the end. But a problem arises in that a story built on two characters clashing can easily become exhausting, predictable or frustrating. If the conflict is all-consuming, there's little room for complexity beyond the back-and-forth struggle, and that can wear a reader down. The issue of likability is crucial — if you only like one character, the story feels lopsided, and if you like neither, there's no real emotional investment. Readers end up either rolling their eyes at the stubbornness of both characters or feeling detached because there’s no one they truly want to follow.

One "solution" is to make one of the two characters so likable that the reader is automatically drawn to them: most crime stories that follow a cop, most hero stories, most fantasy novels, and of course mysteries that revolve around the clever detective, rely on this. But this character has limitations; as we avoid giving them flaws, because any flaw might cause the reader to dislike the character, they become two-dimensional... and if we're writing a series of books, this just becomes worse as we progress. Inevitably, there's nothing to relate to and their inevitable victory feels cheap. And while there are readers who connect with this, these tend to be those who don't recognise their own flaws and believe themselves to be "just like the hero." Such fans get to be troublesome for a writer that wants to achieve more than a brief notoriety.

Moreover, many writers dive into this pit because they have personal grievances they'd like to resolve. It enables us to grind an axe we have, explaining how so many villains wind up being corporate managers or political figures, or indeed any authority, as the writer deeply wants to set them up as the straw man who goes down before the worthy, principled hero. Such works, if they're ever finished (and most of them never are), tend to be woefully heavy handed and thick with the writer's fingerprints, so that it's not hard to see the writer living out a fantasy. Writing such a book seems like a really good idea at the time. Don't do it.

Writing two characters in conflict takes an extremely delicate hand. Both need to be thoroughly fleshed out; both need to have a solid, justifiable stance, which has to be so tight that even a reader that hates that stance has to accept that it's reasonable. Finding masters who achieved this means going back to works written many long years ago, because if the book has survived on the shelves since the time of Dickens, Lawrence or Hemingway, it's probably proved its worth. But we're not these people, not imaginably yet, so let's walk around this pit and move on.

The second pit is to perceive that, because the story is being told in past tense, the characters in the story are concerned with the past and not their futures. I'm not going to get into a discussion here about present and past tense writing... I'm merely saying that, for the character who is struggling to improve their situation in our work, that character ought to be thinking about his or her future. All too often, instead, as writers we worry far too much about that character's past.

While backstory and past struggles can add depth — though I counsel against them unless absolutely necessary — the experience for the reader, reading about someone in the past, who is concerned mainly with their past, is just dull. Interesting people think about their future. Their thoughts are filled with what are they going to do next, and certainly with what they're doing right now; they speculate, they reason, they anticipate... they get excited about what they don't know. If the character spends the book remembering how mother and Aunt Martha were, and what great food they made, while remembering how they were going to do a bunch of things they're not doing now, so they can feel ennui about their present, non-active life... oh gawd, please just give them a gun. Maybe the narrative can follow someone with ambition instead.

If that backstory is the work's first two pages to explain why the character is quitting their present job so they can go DO the thing they failed to do, that's a story. Explain why we've jumped from this road to that and then never talk about it again. The plan is set up: now we want to watch the plan in motion.

The less time we spend explaining "why" a character does anything, the better. It ought to either be obvious, "I always wanted to be rich," or something that drives the character's enigmatic personality; "As I always did at times like these, I took out a quarter and flipped it." That's it. We've accomplished the premise. The character flips quarters. Why isn't relevant until the last ten pages, when we explain it with two sentences in the denouement and it makes perfect sense.

This last, of course, was used in No Country for Old Men. Where it worked fine. We only need to establish that the character knows that it's being done, so the reader can surmise there must be a reason. Of course, it's obvious that as a writer we better have a good one, when the time comes; but the goal is not to dwell upon it, not to monologue about it, not to let it take over the story.

There, let's walk around this pit too. Careful right there. Don't fall in.

Writers spend a lot of time by themselves, so it's self-evident why they don't see the alternative I'm going to recommend. We need to take our two characters and have them start the book together, on the same side... against everybody else.

This allows us to maintain all the same functional conflicts that the first pit offers: as they essentially like each other, they want the same thing... but they can disagree about how to achieve it. They can end up going one-on-one with an opponent, because they don't need to be together all the time; but they can come to each other's rescue. We can distribute the skill set between them, so that the other sometimes comes up short. And we can still have them do all the things a single person can do: take down the bad guy, find the murderer in the bushes, even re-ignite their love life in any number of novel, unexpected ways.

This has been the premise of hundreds of police dramas, since Arthur Conan Doyle balanced a superhero with a plain old ex-military doctor. As he is grounded and relatable, Watson humanises Holmes. One has sharp instincts and is exceptionally sharp-minded; the other is brave, stalwart, empathic. The conversations allow for a give-and-take that is deeply felt wish fulfillment for millions of readers: my other half, my support system, my wake-up call, my rock, my friend. I have no idea why writers don't rush to this approach. It has proven incomprehensibly successful for well over a century. It may be that writers are misanthropes, but I think it's more probable that the approach requires the writing of meaningful, engaging and plot-relevant dialogue.

That is a miasma we must leave for its own discussion.