Series: Building Realistic Characters, Part 4!
The final instalment! Culture, and that all-important Shard of Glass.
Hoppy Easter Monday, and welcome to the final instalment in this character series! Through March, we’ve talked about building realistic characters through physical description, personality, and body language and speech patterns. And now we get to dive into culture and your character’s emotional baggage, also known as the Shard of Glass.
But before we jump into psychoanalyzing fictional people, let’s talk about culture!
Culture covers a wide range of influences: family traditions, holiday observances, social taboos or expectations, folklore, even religious beliefs. And the more you know about the culture your character comes from, the deeper you can understand the reasons behind their beliefs and actions.
Does your character find comfort in their cultural traditions? Do they embrace their role and enthusiastically go along with whatever rules and boundaries exist within that culture? Do they benefit from internal structures of hierarchy and power imbalances? Do they rail against the expectations placed upon them by outside forces? Do they outwardly comply, but secretly subvert or defy the status quo?
In Katherine Arden’s The Bear and the Nightingale, set in medieval Russia, main character Vasya grows up a wild child—a witch’s granddaughter—with the ability to communicate with the folkloric creatures of the forests and hearths. Her uncanny ways and tendency to disappear into the trees are tolerated because she’s young (not yet of marrying age, when she would need to comply with the expectations that women be subdued and subservient), because she lives in a small village (largely removed from the social pressures of larger cities), and because making small offerings to the house spirits is still the norm for her small community.
All that changes with the arrival of an orthodox Christian priest, who crusades to “save” the village from their “heathen gods,” and he becomes obsessed with Vasya, who embodies everything he is supposed to denounce.
The culture around Vasya changes dramatically—because she becomes old enough for propriety to become a concern, and because the beliefs of her village begin to shift—and it’s that culture that is a major driving force for the entire conflict and plot.
The Bear and the Nightingale is a great example of how world-spanning culture influences character and story, but you don’t always have to go so big.
Is your character from a family where questioning authority was disrespectful and taboo? Or did they grow up encouraged to speak their mind? Do they come from a small town where wanting something more is considered presumptuous and arrogant? Or is ambition highly valued in their community?
Alix E. Harrow’s Starling House has a fantastic thread running throughout where main character Opal—an orphan who grew up extremely poor—talks about the two lists you have: things you need, and things you want. And when you grow up poor, you learn to ignore everything on that second list. That entrenched belief leads Opal to dismiss her own desires and do some very dangerous things, all in the service of taking care of her younger brother and getting him out of their dying, bad-luck small town.
That small Kentucky town that serves as backdrop for Starling House is a fantastic example of how culture can then intersect with a character’s emotional baggage. An abandoned mine, oft-retold stories of ghosts or monsters, the pervasive scarcity of everything from money to healthy food to books to opportunities, it all builds into an atmosphere where it makes sense that people are guarded and small-town minded. Opal thinks she can’t depend on anyone else, and at least at the beginning of the book, we believe her.
Enter… the SHARD OF GLASS.
Blake Snyder first talked about the Shard of Glass in his screenwriting guide, Save the Cat, and it essentially refers to a deep wound within a character that has since been scabbed and scarred over, but still influences how they interact with their world and other characters. Jessica Brody took Synder’s principles and adapted them for writers, publishing Save the Cat Writes A Novel, and describes it like this:
It’s your job to not only diagnose the real problem in your hero’s life, but cure it as well. We call that real problem the shard of glass. It’s a psychological wound that has been festering beneath the surface of your hero for a long time. The skin has grown over it, leaving behind an unsightly scar that causes your hero to act the way they act and make the mistakes that they do (flaws!). You, as the author and creator of this world, have to decide how that shard of glass got there. Why is your hero so flawed? What happened to them to make them the way they are?
Do they have a fear of abandonment? A scarcity complex? Are they obsessed with gaining approval from authority figures? This is where you get to play psychoanalyst (and just a smidge psychopath) and figure out what damage your character has. And then, and this is critical, they have to face it.
Opal grows up destitute and abandoned, believing she has to do absolutely everything on her own because everyone else will always let her down. But the plot can’t resolve until she lets go of those beliefs and lets another pivotal character in to help her.
In my Sea Story WIP, both of my main characters have enormous trust issues—Briony because she’s been surviving on her own since she was a young teenager, and Aris because the community he thought he could trust mutinied and killed those closest to him—and it’s not until they’re able to be vulnerable with each other at a crucial turning point that the plot is able to move forward.
Figuring out the shard of glass and the reason for your character’s most damaging flaws is the key to making your story work. Not only does it give you a deep understanding of your character, it tells you (and your readers) why they act the way they do, why they want what they want, and what is actually going to give them what they need to heal and move forward with their lives. (Which, spoiler alert, is almost never what they think they want from the beginning.)
From here, you can explore internal versus external goals, larger plot arcs, and all the other fun parts of story, knowing that you’ve built an authentic emotional foundation that your readers will resonate with and believe.
Some of my favourite stories with amazing character development are Delilah Green Doesn’t Care by Ashley Herring Blake (romance), The House in the Cerulean Sea by TJ Klune (fantasy), The Birth House by Ami McKay (literary), and practically anything by Helen Humphries or James Herriot.
And if you like drafting out character sketches by hand, these character worksheets are fantastic, and also cover creating secondary characters and mapping out the relationships between your character cast.
Did you enjoy this series? Did you find it helpful? Leave a comment and let me know!