Miles Takes Over — "A Quiet Word About Characters Who Aren't Actually Characters”

Character Takeover Series | Entry 02 Miles Stone agreed to write this under the condition that it not become a "content piece." He was told no promises. He wrote it anyway.

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I want to start by saying I'm not a writer.

I'm a researcher — archives, genealogy, local history. I spend most of my time with documents and the people who understand them, which means I spend a lot of time thinking about what makes a person legible on paper. How you capture someone who lived in a way that makes them feel real to someone who didn't.

That's not so different from what fiction does.

So when I was asked to write about character development — specifically about the kinds of characters that don't work — I said yes, because this is a problem I understand from a slightly different angle. I've encountered real people who've been reduced to flat archetypes in historical records, their complexity sanded down to whatever made them convenient for the narrative being told about them.

Fiction writers do the same thing sometimes. Not out of malice. Out of not quite understanding how people actually work.

So let me offer a few observations.

On Flatness: The Character Who Has One Note

The flat character is, at its core, a character defined by their function rather than their personhood.

The loyal friend. The wise mentor. The ruthless villain. The comic relief. The love interest.

These aren't characters. They're roles, and they remain roles as long as the writer is thinking primarily about what they need the character to do rather than who the character is when the plot isn't requiring anything of them.

The question I find most useful is this: what does this character want that has nothing to do with the protagonist?

Every real person has an interior life that exists independently of the people around them. They have preferences and irritations and private worries and things they've been thinking about since Tuesday that have no bearing on anything else happening in the room. A flat character, when the protagonist isn't present, essentially ceases to exist — they're waiting in the wings for their next scene.

A real character is living their life in every scene, whether the protagonist is watching or not.

This doesn't mean you have to show all of it. It means you have to know all of it. Characters become three-dimensional when the writer understands them so completely that the specific, idiosyncratic details they choose to reveal — the small thing the character notices, the particular way they respond under pressure, the sentence they start and don't finish — feel like the tip of something much larger.

The reader should feel the iceberg. The visible portion should be interesting because of what it implies about everything underneath.

On the Mary Sue: A More Precise Diagnosis

The "Mary Sue" label gets applied broadly and not always accurately, so I want to be specific about what's actually happening when a character earns that description.

It's not about competence. Highly competent characters are not inherently the problem. Some people are genuinely exceptional — brilliant, talented, capable in ways that exceed the average. Writing those people truthfully is not a failure of craft.

The issue is cost.

A Mary Sue — or the equivalent in any gender — is not a character who is excellent. It's a character whose excellence is consequence-free. They're skilled without the backstory of developing that skill. They're loved without the vulnerability that makes someone worth loving. They're right without the history of being wrong. They move through the world with an ease that real people, no matter how capable, don't actually experience — and the reader registers that ease as falseness, even when they can't name exactly what's wrong.

Competence costs something. It costs time, and sacrifice, and usually a period of significant failure that the character had to survive in order to get good. Exceptional people are often exceptionally aware of what they gave up to be exceptional, and that awareness is part of their texture.

Love costs something. Being truly known by another person requires showing them the things you'd rather keep hidden, and living with the vulnerability of that. Characters who are beloved by everyone around them without ever revealing anything risky about themselves are characters who haven't actually been loved — they've been admired.

Being right costs something. Characters who are right consistently, whose intuitions are never wrong, whose judgment is never questioned — they're not protagonists. They're oracles. And oracles make for very unsatisfying companions in a narrative.

Give your exceptional characters real costs. Let them be bad at something important. Let them be wrong in a way that matters. Let the thing that makes them remarkable also be connected to the thing that makes them difficult, or limited, or lonely.

Excellence with texture is compelling. Excellence without cost is wallpaper.

On the Antagonist Who Is Evil for Convenience

This one is particular to me, probably because of my work with historical records — how often real people who caused real harm were, in their own understanding, doing something justified or even righteous.

A villain who is cruel simply because the story needs an obstacle is a flat character with better lighting.

The antagonist I find most difficult — and therefore most true — is the one who wants something recognizable. Not world domination in the abstract, but something specific and human: security, respect, the reversal of a humiliation they've carried for twenty years, the protection of something they love by any means necessary.

The most unsettling real-world people I've encountered in documents are not the ones who were incoherently monstrous. They're the ones whose reasoning was, step by step, almost comprehensible — who got from a legitimate grievance to a terrible action through a series of choices that each felt, to them, like the only available option.

That's not a comfortable antagonist to write. It requires genuine understanding rather than judgment. But it produces a character the reader will think about long after the book is finished, because they couldn't simply dismiss them.

Ask what your antagonist believes they're protecting. Ask what they've lost. Ask what they would tell you, in their own words, about why they did what they did — and write a version of that account that is, however partially, coherent.

The discomfort of a coherent villain is far more interesting than the comfort of a simple one.

On the Supporting Character Who Exists Only to Validate the Protagonist

I'm going to be direct about this one, because I think it's the most common and least discussed problem.

Supporting characters who exist primarily to admire the protagonist, confirm their conclusions, carry out their instructions, and reflect their brilliance back at them are not characters. They are mirrors.

And the protagonist surrounded by mirrors is not a protagonist in relationship with other people. They're a protagonist in an echo chamber, and echo chambers, however comfortable for the person inside them, are not interesting to observe from the outside.

Real relationships have friction. Not necessarily conflict — friction. Moments where the other person doesn't understand. Where they push back. Where they want something different than the protagonist wants and say so, clearly, without being persuaded immediately.

The supporting character who disagrees — genuinely, from a real place, for a real reason — is the supporting character who tells the reader something true about the protagonist. Because we learn who people are by watching how they respond to resistance. A protagonist who only ever receives agreement never has to demonstrate who they are under pressure.

Let your supporting characters have competing agendas. Let them be right sometimes when the protagonist is wrong. Let them carry the story forward in scenes the protagonist isn't in.

They'll become real. And when they become real, the protagonist becomes more real too — because they're no longer surrounded by mirrors. They're surrounded by people.

A Final Note

The characters I remember longest — in fiction, in records, in life — are the ones who contradicted themselves in recognizable ways. Who wanted things that were in tension with each other. Who were admirable in some respects and genuinely flawed in others, and who didn't seem to be aware of all their own contradictions.

That's what people are. That's what makes them worth paying attention to.

Write people like that. The rest tends to follow.

— Miles Stone

P.S. Cressida read a draft of this and said I "buried the lede and used too many semicolons." For the record, I used three semicolons and the lede is exactly where it should be.