You think you know people. But you don’t.

It takes years, decades, to know someone really well. Often it’s not until something really bad happens that you see a side of them that was hidden deep below the surface. Something so buried they may not have known it themselves.

Discovering hidden character traits is confronting. Sometimes it’s hard to keep liking the person. Wonder why so many relationships fail? If things stayed as sunny as when friendships or romances began, there would be no need to put an end to it and walk away. But things sour, and when they do, it’s probably impossible to recapture the earlier version of the person. The version without the flaws and baggage that made them so much more fun to be with.

When things end, you look back with hindsight and wonder why you couldn’t see the problems. It’s easy, looking back, to see negative traits lurking around the edges.

In the same way, there are positives about people that we come to discover much later. It’s the sense of not realising how sweet someone could be, or working out that distance was not because the person was unfriendly or unpleasant, but just an introvert.

What about when you are dealing with fictional people? You write something and so you invent a person. With that comes the chance to make that character the perfect being. But it isn’t so easy. Characters kind of write themselves. Characters that are completely good and perfect are boring. To make a character interesting you need to make them real, and this of course requires weighing them down with the kind of character foibles we can all relate to.

So you write characters, building them bit by bit, and you think you know what they are about. But you really don’t, for just when you think you have them pegged, something happens in the story (needs to happen, otherwise what’s it about?) and this is when your characters are tested so they can show what they’re really made of. That makes for fare more interesting reading than Barbie and Ken characters and sunny plots.

I’ve worked out, during the second draft of my novel, that I actually know my characters so much better than in the first draft. Getting to the end of the first meant writing them all on the page. I needed to get to the end of the story so I could find out what the story actually was. Naturally, there were many inconsistencies. Some chapters had my characters behave in terribly uncharacteristic ways. Combing through the manuscript a second time allows me to put those inconsistencies right. I read what I wrote a few months ago and think, X would never do that! So I fix it.

The difference between characters on the page and real people is that the ones on the page (or screen) allow us some degree of control, some way of deciding what they should or should not do. Naturally, with room for the creative progress to suggest character growth, plot twists and turns, there is a degree of unpredictability, which can only be good for a story.

Thinking about building characters and how this relates to narrative makes me realise why living life with living, breathing people is so interesting. In one regard, it’s a bit like existing between the pages of a novel that’s in the making. It’s interactive, and you have control, though only so much. No matter how meticulously you plan, you never know what is going to happen on the next page. It’s nail biting, it’s scary, and you need so much more courage than is required when dreaming up fantasy people in their make-believe worlds.