Diagnosing Characters to Write Them Like a Doctor
Words matter. The right ones can propel us to pursue our dreams; the wrong ones can stop us in our tracks. I know this first hand because for decades I had a secret fantasy that I found hard to act on because I stumbled over a single word: writer.
For years I told myself that’s what I wanted to be—a writer. Inspired by the thrillers I read after long days working as a cardiologist, healthcare administrator, husband, and father, I’d imagine my own books as I put my head to the pillow. But I never sat in the chair and stared at the blank screen because the idea of being a writer seemed foreign and daunting. What did I know about that? I’d never studied literature or attended an MFA program.
(What They Don’t Teach You in MFA Programs.)
Then, one day, something clicked. My perspective changed because I found a new word: storyteller. I understood that what I wanted to do was something I had already been doing for years. I had training. I was good at it.
People go to physicians because of our specialized knowledge about chemistry, genetics, and biology. We can figure out and treat the mysterious causes of what ails them. But our success rests as much on our ability to read people as it does on deciphering X-rays and lab results.
An effective doctor is an expert story-listener. Our job begins with taking down an extensive medical history of each patient. Their story, which doctors must tease out and expand upon like a reporter interviewing a source, is the foundation of almost every diagnosis.
An effective doctor is also an expert storyteller. We must combine the personal information we glean from story-listening with our medical knowledge to create a story that will make sense to our patients. Just like writers, our words are tools we use to move our audience. We must tell a story that is powerful and true, in order to have the desired impact—which is to have our patients understand their issues and to work with them to devise the best plan of treatment. The story we tell them about their condition has to resonate with them.
When I finally began work on my debut thriller, Coded To Kill, I was able to create and flesh out my characters by imagining that they were patients from whom I was taking a medical history. Just as patients are far more than the images and test results that are vital to their care, characters are much more than the function they serve to move along the plot. I needed them to tell me what was really going on—why they were feeling a certain way, why they were taking certain actions. I created detailed histories of even my minor characters so that what I said about them on the page would ring true.
Check out Marschall Runge’s Coded To Kill here:
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I think this approach would work for any non-professional writer who wants to write: A lawyer or salesperson might imagine their characters as clients they are trying to get to know. A mother or father might see their characters as children they are trying to understand. By listening to, and taking a deep interest in their lives, we can tell their story.
The classic advice for authors is write what you know. But in writing my book I also found it’s helpful to work the way you know how to.
Here are two lessons I learned about creating characters that might be helpful to other writers:
Fall In Love With Your Characters
The heroes and villains in Coded To Kill started snapping to life—morphing from plot devices in early drafts to full-bodied figures—as my emotional attachment to them grew. The more I learned about them, the more I cared, and the more interesting they became.
In writing and revising almost every scene, I asked of each character: What would they do? Why would they do it? As I learned more about who each of them were, where they came from, the experiences that shaped them, the problems that haunted them, my answers, and their actions, took on greater depth.
For example, the book’s hero, Dr. Mason Fischer, is a cardiologist (like me) from a small Texas town (like me) who fearlessly tries to thwart evildoers (unlike me) to atone for tragedies he blames himself for. This is why he doesn’t just practice medicine, but seeks to right the world—in this case to determine who has turned cutting-edge medical technology meant to save lives into the world’s greatest killing machine.
Don’t Fall in Love With Your Characters
Ultimately, I realized that I was creating characters to serve the plot whose goal was to engage my readers. Like a parent who realizes others only have so much interest in your amazing kids, I kept asking myself what do readers need to know rather than what do I want to tell them?
In most cases, this meant selecting just a few of the signature habits and details that told me who my characters were—their interests and hobbies, what they like to eat, wear and read—to hone in on the few things that drove their behavior. In one case it meant cutting an entire character I was quite proud of. After hundreds of pages, I realized he just slowed things down. It was a hard, but necessary, cut.
Above all, I learned that we are all story-listeners and storytellers. By tapping into this experience we can overcome the often-fearsome idea of being a writer and, in the end, become one.
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