Spirituality: A Forgotten Key to Character Development

Photo by Debby Hudson on Unsplash

Just reading the title of this post, you may be internally screaming, “PREACHY TOPIC!” However, this isn’t a post about religion in story.

This post is about how your characters are more than the things that happen to them. They have an inner life—a spirit—and so their character development needs to reflect that. If you’re like me, you’ve managed to complete a second draft of your novel project, write about character weakness, and only then remember that your writing teacher talked about giving the main character a weakness. Ha! But writing out this piece is how it clicked for me.

Before I share what I’ve learned about the connection between spirituality and character weakness, I want to mention that I’m going to be talking about Christian spirituality in this post. I realize that not all writers or readers of this blog are followers of Jesus, but being one myself has shaped my worldview and opinions for this post, as well as caused my writing and observations to heavily reflect my beliefs. If that doesn’t sound helpful to you, feel free to stop reading!

Okay, on to character weakness and spirituality.

I believe people are spirit-beings

That sounds creepy, but as my friend puts it: “We don’t live in a physical world with spiritual elements. We live in a spiritual world with physical elements.”

People are always searching for worth and value—sometimes in the right place and more often than not, in the wrong place. We are created by God in His image, yet born with an emptiness that can only be filled by God, but so often we look to fill that elsewhere. All the searching that we do can be tied back to unawareness of—or a lack of belief in—what God says about Himself and about us.

People are weak. We struggle, even with small things.

At a young writers’ conference in June 2017, one of the speakers gave a talk in which he really focused on the weaknesses of people, showing us how we all have struggles, and that we aren’t the only ones in the world with problems. He had us write a few of our most pressing life issues on a scrap of paper, and they were placed in a container and brought on stage. He picked up the first paper from the overflowing container and read it aloud. You know what? No one wrote down their most pressing problem as, “Kill the dragon and rescue the princess.”

We wrote things like, “don’t know what to do with my life,” “anxiety,” and “depression.”

Some were pretty intense.

Your characters must have something of the same problems. Sure, they’ll have the main goal of finding the princess, but what inner struggles do they have? Your character’s emptiness needs to be exposed, and they need to look to fill that hole with something. Some characters will fill it with God, and some won’t.

What is your character’s emptiness? Is he lonely? Afraid? Self-conscious? People turn to addictions and/or run from their problem in several ways. Not all addictions come in the form of drugs and alcohol. Some people fill their life with their job, some are addicted to the gym. Some people oversleep. Some overeat. Watch TV. Gamble. Write blog posts instead of working on their Work-In-Progress. *coughs*

What is your character’s subtle addiction? What does he turn towards to try to fill his emptiness? How does he run from his problem? How do these coping mechanisms help for a little while? How do they fail? How do they reinforce the problem?

One of the most important realizations I’ve come to, in learning to write, is that characters need to struggle aside from the overarching story goal. Again, the fact that nobody in that speaker’s session wrote down “Defeat the dragon” is telling. The problem shouldn’t be completely disjointed from the story, but it still needs to be an everyday problem. What is your character’s most pressing difficulty, apart from the main story goal?

Digging even deeper

·   How does the struggle tie into how the character views himself and God?

·   How is that struggle resolved at the end?

·   What hope, or lack thereof, is there at the end of the story in relation to the resolution of that problem?

It doesn’t matter when your story takes place historically: all people struggle. As the Bible says, “There is nothing new under the sun.” This concept works in your fantasy or sci-fi novel as well because even if your characters are talking bunnies or hybrid cyborg-men (maybe not the robot characters…), they are mirroring what people are like. They have personalities, they talk, they have feelings, and so on.

Here is my brainstorm of possible ways a character could struggle spiritually. I hope they give you some idea of the range of possibilities.

Does the character struggle with knowing if they’re truly saved—does fear of dying and going to Hell keep them awake all night?

Do they struggle with legalism: knowing Christ died for them, but they still somehow try to earn their salvation?

What is that one sin that keeps dragging them down?

Does the character feel unwanted and ugly?

Does the character feel weak and like a failure compared to his seemingly perfect older brother (keeping in mind that the older brother could struggle with pride while hating that pride)?

What about the character, Scott, who keeps all his feelings bottled up inside himself. There is that one person, Edgar, he would usually tell his struggles to, but Edgar is dealing with issues that Scott sees as so much more “significant” than his own. Scott doesn’t want to add to Edgar’s problems, so he keeps his “smaller” struggles to himself, and they weigh him down and discourage him because he has no one to tell.

Finding gender-specific struggles can be interesting too, because often males and females handle things differently.

You know what that speaker’s session did? It helped all of us relate to each other and see each other as real people with real problems. It was a relief to know that I’m not the only one who doesn’t have it all together.

Giving your characters “everyday problems” will do the same for your readers. They will have a sense of connection to your character because the problems relate to those the reader has experienced. They are meaningful to the reader, and they make him feel something. And that is the goal of a Story: to create emotion.

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What is your character’s most pressing problem, apart from the main story goal?

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