The 150-Year-Old Character Problem Nobody Told You About

There is a 150-year-old literary movement built around a character-writing problem we still haven’t solved.

The problem is this: how much does your protagonist actually get to choose?

That is a very literal question and I will tell you why that is a question worth your time as a writer in just a moment, because we talk about characters as though they walk into a story with every possible decision available to them, as though the only thing determining what they do next in your story is their personality, their desire, or their will. Sometimes assuming a brave character and a cowardly character are separated by nothing more than the contents of their psychology.

If that’s what you believe as a writer that’s totally fine, but I’m afraid to say that’s just not true.

That's the true problem of the matter.

Writers were becoming fascinated by this exact problem in the late nineteenth century.

The movement became known as Naturalism. What it was, what it was responding to, what it was trying to do, and why it still matters is useful to contemporary writers and their fiction.

Naturalism emerged in France in the 1860s and 70s, through the work of Émile Zola, a novelist, and spread quickly to America through writers like Theodore Dreiser, Stephen Crane, and Frank Norris.

It was a reaction against the Romanticism that had dominated literary culture for decades, the idea that human beings were essentially free, essentially noble, essentially capable of transcending their circumstances through force of will or purity of spirit.

Very romantic notions, indeed.

But Naturalist writers were skeptical of that idea (as am I). Deeply skeptical.

They had been reading Darwin. They had been watching industrialization transform cities and create new forms of poverty and hazardous conditions that no amount of individual virtue could escape. They had been observing, with the precision and attention of scientists, what actually happened to people under specific social and economic conditions.

What they observed was that human behavior doesn’t happen in isolation.

To an extent, you already know this to be true.

Your environment matters. Social conditions matter. Material circumstances matter. Heredity matters.

For Naturalist writers these are more than interesting details surrounding a character, they are forces acting upon them, shaping what they could see, what they could want, what they could reach, and what they could survive.

And here is where that’s profoundly useful to a writer.

Zola described the novelist’s job as something close to a scientific experiment. You build a character with a specific psychology and place them inside a specifically designed environment. Then you observe what happens when those two things interact. The outcome is not invented by the writer. It is produced, to put it bluntly. The same sort of way that chemical reactions are inevitable, these specific conditions and compounds produces this specific result.

That idea created some of the most devastating fiction ever written.

Dreiser’s Carrie Meeber in Sister Carrie, moving through a world where her options are so constrained that every choice she makes is already half-made for her by the circumstances she arrived in.

Crane’s Maggie, a girl of the streets, who never had access to the life the novel’s more comfortable characters take for granted.

These characters are not passive, they want things, they try, they make decisions. But they make those decisions inside conditions that have already narrowed the field of possibility in ways they cannot always see and cannot always escape.

How does that apply to my fiction? You ask.

Well.

Watch this.

Imagine two women who both desperately want to leave the town they grew up in. Both have the same desire and want it with the same intensity. In both of them lives the same longing for something larger than what is available to them here, in this small town.

One has savings. A university degree. She has parents who have told her they will help if anything goes wrong. She has a friend with a spare room in another city who has already said the offer stands.

She leaves that small town.

The second woman has sixty dollars until payday. Her mother depends on her financially, concretely, every month, the rent, the medical bills, the groceries. She works for one of the only major employers in town and leaving means giving up the job that makes the rent and food and healthcare possible.

She has never lived anywhere else. She has no savings, no degree, no friend with a spare room, no safety net of any kind, and leaving means abandoning the person whose survival is partly her responsibility.

Does she leave?

No.

She stays.

Did I just give you a brave character and a cowardly character?

No.

I gave you two characters whose identical desire produced opposite outcomes because the conditions surrounding that desire were very different.

The first woman’s life had already opened a door.

The second woman’s life had already closed it. Neither of them truly, fully chose the conditions that made that difference.

That is the Naturalist insight, and it changes how you think about character.

Because if you only ask what does this character want, both women give you the same answer. If you ask what does this character choose, they give you opposite answers.

Underneath both questions is something much more interesting: what choices did their lives actually make available to them?

This does not mean your characters have no agency at all.

Naturalism is not fatalism.

The most interesting Naturalist characters are not passive recipients of their circumstances, the opposite in fact, they push against them, they try to escape them, they find small freedoms inside large constraints.

Some succeed. Some do not.

What Naturalism insists on is that agency exists inside conditions. That your protagonist is not just a personality making decisions, they are really a person who arrived on page one already embedded inside a life.

A family.

A body.

A social position.

An economic reality.

A particular place at a particular time.

A set of relationships that carry obligations.

All of those things have already opened some doors and closed others before the story even begins.

This is where contemporary writers, I think, leave so much on the table.

We know what our characters want and fear and believe. We construct their inner lives. Then we place them in conditions that are largely frictionless, conditions that don’t push back, that don’t narrow the available choices, that don’t force the character to make decisions they can afford rather than decisions they most want to make.

The result is characters who feel rich but are, more or less, socially weightless. Characters whose decisions are constrained by their personality, not by the material reality of the life they are living. Which means the choices they make feel less inevitable than they should.

Naturalist writers were building entire novels around the opposite problem. The conditions were as carefully constructed as the psychology. The environment was as much a character as the people moving through it.

Here is a set of Naturalist questions I think you should be stealing for your own manuscript.

What forces have already shaped the choices they have available?

What has their economic situation already decided for them before the scene begins?

What has their family history already foreclosed?

What does their social position make visible and what does it make invisible?

What can they imagine wanting and what is so far outside their available reality that it never even occurs to them as a possibility?

Your character doesn’t make decisions in a vacuum. They make them inside a life that has already been doing its work on them for years.

The more accurately you understand that life, not just the personality but also the conditions, the constraints before your story starts, the more inevitable your character’s decisions will feel.

Inevitability, it’s worth saying here, is not the same as predictability. Inevitable means it could only have happened this way for this specific person under these specific conditions.

Predictable means the reader saw it coming because they’ve seen it before.

Naturalist writers are after the first thing, that inevitability. That is still the problem. It was the problem 150 years ago and it is the problem now.

Writers who are solving it, with characters who feel like they exist inside a real world that pushes back against them, are doing something Zola would have recognized immediately.