Character Interactions

This could be seen as a companion piece of sorts to last week’s post about heist stories, where I pointed out that heist stories always work with a larger cast of main characters, because it’s necessary. This post is more about how to make character interactions more meaningful.

No character exists in a vacuum, first of all. Human characters wouldn’t survive that, anyway. But there’s a difference between having your main character make small talk with the people around them or buy stuff from the helpful merchant NPC and having your main character have meaningful interactions with other people. If that merchant NPC and the main character have been living in the same community for years and the main character is always buying from the NPC, it’s highly likely that they will be exchanging some personal lines in the process.

Let’s take, perhaps, an unexpected example: Agent 47 from the “Hitman” games. 47, even after the soft reboot they did in 2016, is the result of genetic experiments to create the perfect killer. The experiments succeeded with him, as it were. But even 47 knows people, first of all his handler Diana Burnwood. And the interactions between them, more often just in the form of calls, rarely in person, show that there is a personal connection. They know each other and they talk like people who have (at the time of the soft reboot) worked together for twenty years, roundabout. There is care on both sides - which makes the first mission of “Hitman: Absolution” so heartbreaking. Despite the fact that you don’t see them face to face that often and 47 is anything but a fully-functional human (although he has some amazing skill sets you wouldn’t expect from a killer), there’s clearly a real personal relationship to look at. Not a romantic one, not a close one, but a personal relationship between two people which has an influence on the way they talk to each other. Small remarks like ‘I know how you do love a challenge’ show that very clearly.

And that is the real point about making character interactions more meaningful. Some books about writing suggest that you should keep a dialogue to the necessary lines, just those things people talk about which are important for the story. I can’t subscribe to that. I want for the dialogue to sound more realistic - and a realistic dialogue includes a bit more than just ‘we’re leaving town tomorrow at noon’ or ‘twenty carrots.’ People talk about more than just the bare-bone basics. They talk about the weather, about the family, about something which just happened. At least they say something like ‘hello’ and ‘bye.’ And, if you spin it right, that is even a great advantage. You can deepen the characters this way, you can throw in little bits about their past, their family, their life. All by not just including the lines which are relevant to the plot. Remember: everything in a story should either serve the plot or the character development. A longer conversation might not always fully serve the plot, but it can very well serve the character development - of all characters involved, if you’re really lucky.

But character interaction goes far above just dialogue. Of course, characters interact when they talk. But they can also interact through gestures or actions. Every interaction between two characters should reflect their relationship, no matter whether it’s a good or a bad one. Interactions should be consistent in that aspect, so the audience will, in time, come to expect them. It gives the audience the feeling that they’ve understood the characters and make them feel closer to the characters they meet often. Signatures come in here as well, but I’ve already written about that and I’m not going to do so again.

Another aspect about interactions between characters is that they should develop realistically. For instance throwing characters together in a romantic subplot can feel very forced, if they haven’t interacted before or their interactions never suggested any kind of romantic interest. Too many writers, especially for TV series or movies, seem to ignore that point. They seem to think that merely throwing two good-looking people together will be enough (although playing the ‘will they/won’t they’ game for several seasons isn’t any better). What goes for romantic relationships also goes for other kinds of relationships. Friendships, enmities, work relationships, they all should evolve during the course of a story. It’s not just the main character who changes. The world changes as well, if only in little ways sometimes.

In most cases, your characters will not have completely the same relationships to each other at the end of the story as they had at the beginning. Friends might be closer after what they went through together. Enemies could be even worse enemies - or they could be on much better terms, depending on what happened. A love relationship can have come or gone.

Which brings me to another topic of character interaction. Very few stories seem to depict long-term (or at any rate already established) relationships. Romance stories are usually about two characters meeting and falling in love. Romance subplots are often drawn out to keep the audience wondering whether or not two characters will come together. Or the story portrays the tragic end of a relationship. I don’t really understand why, because a relationship which has already come together can be very interesting for a story. The characters are no longer in that dance of getting to know and getting to love each other. They should be more relaxed in each other’s company. They can deepen their relationship and they can expand it. I’ve had a lot of fun writing the relationships between Jane and Cedric (Knight Agency) and Jane and Cynthia (Black Knight Agency), once they were established. Having two characters who know they are together is interesting and allows for much more different interactions between them. Of course, those relationships aren’t the main point of the plot in this case, but I still do like them very much, because they add more depth to the characters.

Interactions between characters are an important part of every story and they should never be underestimated. Even small interactions can go a long way and it’s never wrong to add them to a scene to flesh it out some more and make the whole story a bit stronger.