Writing Rational Characters (Notes From Windy Con)

With all the things that have happened since mid-November, I haven't yet had a chance to touch on some of the pearls of wisdom I brought back from this year's Windy Con. In particular, though, I wanted to share some of the really good points that were made at my last panel of the convention, which was titled Writing Rational Characters. Because it sounds simple... but there was a lot that got covered in the 1-hour time limit we had.

Some of it was depressing, but we soldiered through it.

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What Makes a Rational Character?

While there were a lot of things brought up in the early part of the panel (Ayn Rand's name got thrown around, for example), we all reached a mutually agreed-on definition of rationality when it comes to characters in fiction. In short, a rational character is someone who, using the information and resources they have access to, takes sensible steps to achieve their goals.

Note that the goals of a character don't have to be rational... merely their efforts and actions for reaching those goals.

For example, a character might have the absolutely batshit goal of destroying all life on the world. This goal might be because they are a servant of the god of death and they hope to usher in their lord's victory, or because they believe that pointless suffering of billions can be ended by allowing all of them to ascend to a deserved afterlife as martyrs, but their goal is still the annihilation of all life. That doesn't make them irrational, as a character, as long as they take sensible steps toward actually achieving this goal, and reaching their victory condition.

It does probably make them the villain of your story, though.

Lessons From Reality

A topic that we kept circling back to on the panel was that people, by and large, aren't rational beings. We hold a lot of beliefs that don't make sense, we act out of pure emotion, or we can end up believing some truly out-there nonsense.

This is where we get to that, "according to the information they have," caveat that was mentioned earlier. Of course, "the information they allow themselves to believe," might be a better way to put it.

We had to account for some kind of variable, after all.

Let's take a look at some real-life villains for a moment. The fossil fuel industry has known for about a century or more than their product is causing problems with the environment. They also know that their product is limited in supply, and that even if everything else was going well, it will run out. Knowing this, it seems like the smart move, the rational move, for those who run these companies would be to transition to green, renewable sources of energy. This preserves the planet they live on, it acts as a good PR move, but it does something else as well; it sets them up as the new source of energy that they can literally make forever, turning it into the closest thing to an infinite money machine.

Yet for decade after decade, these companies didn't do that. Instead they spent buckets of cash on disinformation campaigns, on political lobbying, and on suppressing competition. Looking at the big picture, this seems like highly irrational behavior. However, just as with characters in our stories, we need to ask what information characters have, and what they allow themselves to have.

Take our Captain Planet villains. Are they indifferent to the harm their industry and product does, because they're going to be dead long before that bill comes due? Have they bought into their own propaganda, simply not believing any of what scientists say? Do they see a disconnect between that disaster and their job, since they only look at sales figures, or marketing, and thus they're insulated from it? Have they been trained so completely by their own culture to view competition and success in business as the ultimate goal that they simply do not see anything outside of bigger profits, bigger numbers, and who's winning in the stock market?

These things don't make a character inherently irrational. However, for the audience to recognize them as acting rationally, they also need at least a little insight into the character's views and perspectives. The same is true of characters who believe ridiculous conspiracy theories, or who suffer from religious delusions; their actions might seem monstrous, unhinged, or counterintuitive, but the audience needs to know what the character's framework is in order to decide whether or not they're rational.

Characters Aren't Required To Be Rational

The conclusion I reached, and which I felt was important to mention in the panel, is that characters don't have to be rational. Whether we're talking about villains like the Joker, or the shock troopers of a hate mob in your detective story, individuals aren't required to have a cogent set of beliefs that make sense to other people.

However, stories are generally supposed to be cleaner, and more orderly, than reality. Because there are hundreds of examples from our real-world history that would have readers rolling their eyes if they showed up in novels instead of textbooks. While rational characters are certainly a concern, you also need to ask what makes for the best story, what is going to feel like it fits within the conventions of this genre, and what actually follows the plot you laid out.

So I want to end this article with the same piece of advice I ended the panel with. Random chance can always make things harder for your characters, but it should never fix things. So as long as irrational actions, thoughts, and beliefs actively make things more difficult, you're on the right track!

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That's all for this week's Craft of Writing! For more of my work, check out my Vocal archive, or at My Amazon Author Page where you can find books like my sword and sorcery novel Crier's Knife, or my most recent short story collection The Rejects!

 

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