You can give a character thirty years of trauma, five formative wounds, a complicated relationship with their parents, and still, having done all that work, end up with a character who has an absence of complexity.
A lot of writers get stuck scratching their heads when they have a character who feels simple and predictable. A writer’s automatic response usually leans toward going deeper into the past. Give them more, darker history, more wounds, more formative moments that explain who they became. Figure out what happened when they were seven, what their mother withheld from them, which friendship first taught them not to trust people, what humiliation they still remember twenty-some years later.
By the by, I’m not dismissing that work at all. I do an enormous amount of it myself when I’m sitting with a character. But sometimes you do all of that, come back to the page, put the character under pressure, and they’re still completely predictable and uninteresting to you or to your readers.
This looks like: The brave character choosing bravery. The loyal character choosing loyalty. The ambitious character choosing ambition.
You can admire them, root for them, understand exactly why they became this way, and still never feel genuinely uncertain about what they’re going to do next. Our aim is creating unpredictability and therefore curiosity. Because those are things readers sink their teeth into.
No matter how complicated a character’s history is, every decision still points in one direction.
So what actually makes a reader uncertain about what a character will do?
Let’s build someone and find out.
Imagine a first-generation college student who wants to graduate at the top of her class. Not just pass, not just get through, she wants to be the very best (like no one ever was!) ;)
Maybe she’s spent her entire life being told, directly or indirectly, what people from her background can or should expect from the world, and now every grade, every paper, every opportunity that lands on her lap has become evidence in an argument she’s been making for years: where I came from does not determine where I can go.
So she works harder than everyone around her. She takes on more than she can comfortably carry, stays up later, prepares longer, and never loses a step.
We understand her. We know what she wants. And that’s exactly the problem.
Because if we know what she wants, we also know what she’ll do. She’ll work harder. She’ll persist. She’ll sacrifice. When the choice comes, she’ll choose the grade. That’s a goal. It’s not yet complexity.
We are going to solve this in the simplest, most accessible way.
We give her something else she wants. But it must be a specific want that does a specific thing, which I will explain, but let’s keep going for the moment.
She wants everyone around her to believe she already belongs there.
She doesn’t want anyone to see the distance between where she came from and where she’s standing now. She doesn’t want to look like she’s catching up, doesn’t want a professor to notice the gaps in her preparation, doesn’t want her classmates to realize that while they’re casually referencing books and ideas they’ve known since high school, she’s quietly writing them down so she can look them up later.
She wants to be the best, but she also wants nobody to see her trying to become the best.
And, in introducing that 2nd want (which is designed as a specific mechanism) now we have a problem.
Because getting to the top of her class requires asking for help when she’s lost. Success requires going to office hours and admitting confusion, letting professors see what she doesn’t know so they can help her learn it. It requires being a student visibly and genuinely, without apology.
But appearing as though she already belongs requires the exact opposite.
So what does she do when she’s sitting in a lecture and realizes she doesn’t understand something fundamental?
Does she raise her hand? If she does, she serves the first want and betrays the second. If she stays silent, she protects the second and jeopardizes the first. She can’t look incompetent.
And suddenly, I don’t know what she’s going to do.
More importantly, neither choice is free. Each choice has a cost associated to it. That’s complexity. That’s it.
Not bigger feelings. Not a more devastating childhood. Not three additional pages of interiority explaining how conflicted she feels.
Just two things she genuinely wants, both completely understandable, and moments that refuse to let her have both.
Now imagine she starts falling behind. A professor notices and offers to meet with her privately. He could help, and she knows he could help. She smiles and says she’s fine, walks away, and fails the next exam.
And now the reader gets to experience one of my favorite things a character can do: working against the very thing they want most because something else they want has become more important in that particular moment.
The story didn’t become more emotional. It became more complicated.
And here’s where this gets interesting, because competing wants don’t always announce themselves this clearly. Sometimes a character doesn’t know about the second one at all.
Imagine a mother who genuinely wants to raise an independent daughter.
She believes in it. She talks about it. She’s built an entire parenting philosophy around it and, perhaps, argued for it with her husband. She wants her daughter to be capable of navigating the world without needing to be rescued, so she holds back when her instinct is to intervene. She lets her daughter have small failures and resists smoothing every surface because she understands that friction is how resilience gets built.
That’s what she wants.
Except she also wants her daughter to need her.
She’d never say it like that, and she may not even consciously know it’s true or that it’s something she wants, (but it would definitely be something she feels) but she also measures love partly by how often she’s called or texted by her daughter. She feels something unnamed when her daughter solves a problem alone that she once would have brought to her. She wants to raise an independent adult and is at the same time terrified of becoming unnecessary in the process.
Now watch what those wants do to each other.
She holds back, and then she doesn’t. She gives advice that wasn’t asked for in moments it wasn’t necessarily needed. She offers help in ways that make the help difficult to refuse. She frames intervention as concern because concern is so much easier to admit than fear.
And I want to be clear about something here: neither want is fake. She genuinely wants her daughter to be independent, and she genuinely wants to remain needed. That’s why the conflict works and escalates.
If one of those wants is merely a lie covering the “real” desire underneath, you haven’t necessarily created competing wants. You’ve created a mask and something behind it. Competing wants become powerful and vivid when both are true, when satisfying one creates a cost for the other, and when the character keeps having to negotiate between them, sometimes consciously and sometimes without understanding what they’re doing at all.
But we can even take this one step further.
Imagine a man who tells his partner he wants complete honesty in their relationship, and he means it. He values transparency as a principle. He’s told the person he loves that he’d rather hear something difficult than be protected from it, and he sincerely believes he’s the kind of person who can handle the truth.
Then his partner tells him something hard.
Really hard…
Our character, in the moment, responds beautifully. He’s gracious, thanks her for telling him, doesn’t raise his voice, and, rather reasonably, he doesn’t make the conversation about himself.
Then, for the next three days, he’s slightly less warm. Slightly less available. A little quieter than usual. We won’t say it’s a punishment, per se. In fact, he’d probably resist that framing completely or deny it outright when approached. He would probably, instead, say he just needs some space. He’s processing. He’s tired. He’s had a long week.
Every individual act is small enough to be deniable, but his partner feels it. And the reader DEFINITELY feels it.
She told him the truth because he asked for honesty, and the honesty cost her anyway.
Why?
Because he had another want.
He wanted to be seen by the person he loved as stable, as someone who didn’t need reassurance, as the kind of partner who could hold difficulty without making it about himself. So when she told him something painful, he couldn’t say, That hurt me. I feel insecure. I need you to reassure me right now.
Because admitting those things would threaten the person he wanted her to believe he was. So he performed graciousness, and the feelings came out somewhere else: in the silence, the distance, the slight withdrawal of warmth.
He asked for honesty. He got it. And the second want made it cost her (and it eventually it will cost him) anyway.
The reader can now see both wants operating simultaneously, which means the reader may understand this character more fully than he understands himself.
And I think that’s where genuinely complicated characters start to emerge. When more than one thing is true at the same time.
The brave character also wants safety or comfort. The loyal character sometimes wants freedom. The fiercely independent person wants, just once, for someone else to carry them. The ambitious person wants success and wants everyone to believe that success comes effortlessly. The honest person wants the truth and also wants never to hear anything that threatens how they see themselves.
Real people aren’t singular.
We want things that undermine other things we want. We believe in principles that become much harder to maintain when they cost us something. We want freedom until freedom feels like we are being abandoned. We want honesty until we hear the truth that leaves scars. We want independence for the people we love until they stop needing us.
That’s not necessarily hypocrisy, although it absolutely can be, humans are known for being monstrous hypocrites. But that’s what it is to want things while also being human.
And this gives you a much faster diagnostic when a character feels thin or simple or boring or predictable. Don’t immediately ask what else happened to them in their past (although those can be indicators pointing to the origin of that 2nd want), but ask what else do they want that contradicts them?
Then make those wants collide.
Because a character can want bravery and safety without becoming complicated if the story never forces them to choose between the two. The mother can want her daughter’s independence and still want to be needed, but the complexity only becomes visible when her daughter stops calling, when that second want feels a hint of pressure. The student can want to be the best and want to appear as though she already belongs, but the conflict only becomes visible when she desperately needs help. The partner can want honesty and want to appear emotionally invulnerable, but we only see the collision when the truth hurts.
The pressure matters because pressure makes coexistence impossible. It turns two abstract desires into one costly decision.
So here’s an incredibly simple exercise worth running on your current characters, it is the MOST DIRECT ROUTE to finding that complexity.
Ask yourself two questions:
What does this character want when life is going well?
And:
What do they want when everything starts falling apart?
Don’t rush the answers, because if they’re essentially the same, if the character wants control when they’re safe and even more control when they’re terrified, you still have one want wearing two different outfits.
If the answers diverge, if the character who wants freedom when they’re safe suddenly wants someone to rescue them when they’re terrified, now there’s something to work with.
And once you’ve found those two wants, don’t just write them into the character profile and move on. Make them compete for the same moment. This requires forethought, it requires a bit of brainstorming, but that pre-work will PAY OFF! I promise!
The brave character can tell the truth or stay safe. The loyal character can protect the person they love or finally choose something for themselves. The mother can let her daughter solve the crisis alone or step in and preserve her place as the person her daughter still needs.
Don’t let them have both.
The moment a character can satisfy every part of themselves simultaneously, the decision becomes easy again, and easy decisions reveal very little.
The reader leans in when either choice costs something. When we genuinely don’t know which part of them is going to win, that’s when we are magnetized to them. Uncertainty is one of the most accessible forms of character complexity you can create.
So if your character feels bland on paper, you can absolutely go deeper into their past. Find the wound. Build the history. Understand what happened to them. That work matters. But before you spend another week excavating their childhood, try something faster.
Give them something they want, and then give them something else they want that makes the first thing harder to have. Find the moment where they can’t keep both.
Make them choose.
Because complexity doesn’t live in how much a character has survived. It lives in the gap between what they want and what they also want.
If you enjoyed this article, please consider becoming a paid subscriber to support my efforts with this publication.
Thank you for reading! :)
Comments
Nothing yet. Say the first thing.
Sign in to join the conversation.