Staying True to Your Characters

Spolier Alert! If you have not seen the season 6 finale of Castle, skip this post. There are some spoilers. 

One of the biggest mistakes you can make with your book is having your character make a decision that is totally uncharacteristic. This is most evident when you're writing a series.
After seven books with Harry Potter as the headliner, we would all say we know Harry pretty well. We've been with him through the good, the bad, and the ugly. If Harry had suddenly decided to abandon the wizarding world,  go back to London, and settle into a perfectly Muggle life, we would all have been pretty upset. If he had surrendered to Voldemort and become a Death Eater, the world would be furious. There probably wouldn't be eight fantastic movies, and J.K. would not, most likely, be a millionaire.

We think we know characters on TV shows pretty well, too, and that's why I was so bothered by the season finale of Castle, "For Better or For Worse". The writers created a situation that I think would never happen. In the episode, Castle and Beckett go to get their marriage license, and find out that Kate is married.
To a guy she dated in college. Who she married at a drive-thru wedding chapel in Vegas "for fun".
"I didn't think it was legal," says Beckett, with a shrug.

Let's get real. This is Kate Beckett. She dated three guys in six years, she solves crimes on a whiteboard, and ruthlessly interrogates people. She wouldn't get married on a whim, and even if she did, she definitely wouldn't write it off as not being legal. She's smart, she's sharp, and there's no way she would do anything like this.

Now Castle, on the other hand, this is totally something he would do.

But the point is this: it is really easy to have your characters do something that they wouldn't normally do to add conflict to the story. And sometimes it is good for a character do something slightly out of character so they don't get too predictable, but you have to know when they are getting too far away from themselves.
You should know your characters well enough to know what they would and wouldn't do.
Some little inconsistent things are fine, but something huge like being married for fifteen years and not knowing it is a pretty big deal. This is not a decision I would have made in my writing. *

The readers of your book should be totally immersed in your world. They shouldn't be thinking about the fact that all of these characters are the products of someone else's imagination. When something happens in a story that makes the reader think, "That character would never do that." it takes the away the reality of the story. It causes us to remember that someone wrote all this, and it's not actually a true story.

There are a few ways to avoid this happening in your writing. One way is just coming up with another option. Make a list of  things that could happen instead of whatever it is that you feel like your character wouldn't do. And don't just write down five other options. Write twenty or thirty. Some of them will be absolutely ridiculous, but one will be just right.
In the case of Castle, the writers could have just switched characters. Obviously, it wouldn't have helped it Esposito suddenly discovered that he was married, but it would have worked if it was Castle. This feels much more believable and the conflict would have worked just about as well.


Have you seen or read anything lately where you felt like a character was making a decision that they wouldn't make? Have you struggled with staying true to your characters?


*So, if you have seen this episode of Castle and the first episode of season 7, you know that Castle disappears. This was a little strained plot-wise, but still I thought the writers handled it very well. So, the whole thing with Kate being married could have something to do with this. I don't know. I doubt it.  Just saying. Any other Castle-watchers feel free to share your thoughts on this.