Developing Meaning

I was reading through a critique recently, and the reader was talking about how much she liked the development of one of my characters.  It got me thinking – what exactly is character development?

There was a time when I thought that character development was making an immature character into a more mature one, one who thought more deeply about his or her actions than they did at the beginning of the book.  But I rejected that notion because it occurred to me that most people aren’t that way.  They don’t go from immature to mature – they just exist.

As my thinking on this expanded, I grabbed what I think is the first part of character development, which is simply getting to know a character.  When the audience first meets someone in one of your books, they know next to nothing about them.  The author, at thus point, can either let the reader’s mind fill in the gaps – a somewhat dangerous proposition – or the author can begin to bring out certain parts of the character.  This goes from physical descriptions, which can come out quickly, to slowly showing parts of the character’s personality, especially through that character’s actions.  As the audience gets to know the character more intimately, the character develops beyond a blank slate, and the reader can determine how closely they associate with the person.

But as my train of thought continued, it occurred to me that it has to go beyond simply getting to know the character.  It has to extend to the character evolving over the course of a story.  You can help the audience get closer to the character all you like, but if that character’s personality is static, then people will rapidly grow bored with them.  Take Mike Faulkner from my novel Salvation Day – he starts out as a grief-stricken man who questions God’s existence.  He evolves along the line of his grief turning into anger, and then that anger turning into regret.  He learns that his perceptions were narrow, and his concerns go beyond the immediate(his wife) to the larger picture(Creation as a whole, and his actions impact on it).

Some characters don’t grow or develop any further.  Those characters are usually throwaways that are meant for specific scenes but who are not meant for long term use.  And that’s the way it has to be – any character that sticks around but who the audience doesn’t know and who doesn’t evolve, is a waste of ink that the reader will roll his or her eyes at whenever they appear.

It’s hard.  Developing a character beyond the initial appearance requires effort.  You have to make a concerted effort, and it’s easy to leave characters behind(I may have done that myself from time to time).  This is one of the things that distinguishes hack writers from good ones.  Remember, anyone can name someone in his or her story, but only a real writer can make the audience care, and that requires development past the first page they appear.