The More Specific Your Characters, The More Universal They Become

Photo by Mehmet Turgut Kirkgoz

Today’s post is by author and editor Tiffany Yates Martin. Join her on Wednesday, October 14, for the online class Specificity & Context.

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For a certain stretch of my early childhood, my love of story and books exceeded my reading ability and comprehension.

I wish I could remember who I have to thank for teaching me about “context cues”—words, hints, and clues surrounding an unfamiliar word that could help me puzzle out its meaning. As a word nerd from the time I understood language, it let me hoover up new vocabulary as quickly as I could decipher it:

• “He delineated his reasons for staying home, going one by one down a long list that started with, ‘I don’t want to go.’”
• “She vanquished her enemies and stood—alone and victorious—on the field.”
• “Schadenfreude made him chuckle as he watched his opponent stumble and fall. Excellent, one less competitor to worry about.”

As I got older I recognized that context cues could also help me decipher the behavior, feelings, and motivations of those around me: The wistful look my mom might get singing along to an oldie on the radio made me wonder what she was remembering from when she was my age and the song was new; the low rumble of an approaching diesel engine combined with the stock-stillness of my dog and his pricked ears means he’s about to lose his natural-born mind on a passing delivery truck.

Context is everything—it expands our understanding of the world around us and the people in it. Without it we’re seeing only a sliver of the full story.

The same idea applies—in spades!—to your writing and stories. No matter how beautifully or painstakingly rendered your characters may be, without context that helps readers understand them, they will never feel real or come fully to life.

What is context in story?

Much like context cues for vocabulary, context in story is anything that gives the reader more breadth and depth of understanding of who a character is, what shaped them, what their day-to-day lives are like, the society and culture and world they live in, their relationships with other characters, and why they think and feel and do what they do.

Context is a form of backstory, creating the backdrop against which the entire story unspools. It allows you to build dimension and depth in your character development, give readers insight into their inner landscape, and let readers see how they’re shaped and affected by their surroundings.

Context should permeate nearly every line of your story—but well-executed context is often subtle, flying under the radar of most lay readers (see what I did there with a context cue explaining what I mean by “subtle” in this usage…?). It’s countless individual threads of specific details about the characters’ lives, invisible to the undiscerning eye, but essential in bringing your fictional world to life.

Just like the context cues that allowed me to understand new words, context in your stories is the specific, concrete, granular details about your characters. They offer the reader clues that let them piece together the full meaning and impact of the journey.

How specificity brings context to life

The key to creating effective context is specificity. One of the most common context pitfalls I see is vague or generic information: “She’s leaving a bad marriage,” “He grew up in a dysfunctional family,” “She loves her job.”

These are generalizations that give the reader nothing concrete to envision, just an amorphous suggestion and not a real, evocative sense of what it means to them, how it affects their thoughts and their worldview, their actions, reactions, and interactions. Vague, general context leaves readers distant from the characters and their world.

It can feel counterintuitive, but the more granular and specific you are in every detail of your characters’ lives, the more universal and relatable they become. Given specific details, readers can more deeply relate to your characters on a personal level, and understand who they are just as we do in real-life relationships. We will—as is human nature—extrapolate their situations to our own. But without the visceral understanding and empathy that specificity creates we can’t do that. We’re trying to pin Jell-O to a wall.

You could say just that a character loves dogs … or you can show that she breeds pointers for tracking competitions; or that she rescues hard-to-place injured or sick or senior strays; or that she volunteers to help rehabilitate and train problem animals that shelters were about to give up on. She might love chihuahuas or Great Danes; sprawl on the floor and let them lick all over her or confine them to a designer purse she carries everywhere; let them run wild and free or strictly train their behavior.

Each one shares a different nuance of who the character is, and that’s the power of specific context. Every tiny detail you share about your character is an opportunity to show the reader who they are.

Digging for specifics

Imagine this exchange we all probably experience daily in real life:

These one-sided conversations go nowhere, which is why conversation experts advise people to ask pointed, open-ended questions that yield specific and substantive answers. “What was your favorite thing that happened today?” “What are you most excited about at work right now?”

Asking these types of questions in your own stories may help you circle in on specifics. Instead of generalizing “a bad relationship,” for example, ask yourself (or your character), What is the hardest thing about it? What parts feel like they’re falling short of what the character hoped for? What’s a specific example that would illustrate that dynamic?

This is where your imagination and skill come fully into play. What specifically characterizes your character’s relationship as “bad”? Can you imagine a particular situation that illustrates a specific unhappy or uncomfortable exchange that represents that larger dynamic? What kind of ongoing atmosphere might that create within the relationship? How might that situation/circumstance feel to your character, and how exactly might those feelings manifest? And how might that in turn shape her behavior, actions, attitude: with her partner, with others in the household, in other relationships and situations outside the home?

Get as concrete and granular as you can; it’s much easier to pull back than it is to try to create the kind of depth and specificity you’re looking for, so let yourself fully and concretely imagine the situation.

Context creates cohesive, believable story

That concrete context for your character and their reality—whatever went into forming who they are when we “meet” them in your story—then gives you a rich wellspring to draw from in organically determining what your character wants, what they do, and how they react.

Just like each of us in real life, the characters in your stories are all products of their environment, circumstances, experiences, and history. This kind of granularity and detail is what creates characters who feel real—the ones who “leap off the page” and linger in readers’ minds long after they finish reading.

Additional reading:

• Add Meaning and Impact to Your Stories with Stealth Context
• How Specifics Make Your Stories Universal
• How to Write Deeper Characters

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