‘In fiction, we end up writing about individuals, however hard we resist them. Hilary Mantel’s A Memoir of My Former Self. A life in writing.’
I need to develop and love my characters.
KAI>
A Memoir of My Former Self circles a truth writers keep tripping over like a root in the path: we may begin with systems, eras, classes, ideas, weather fronts of history—but fiction insists on people. Individuals walk onstage whether invited or not.
Loving characters doesn’t mean approving of them, or flattering them, or letting them off the hook. It means granting them full human physics. Weight. Inertia. Contradiction. Private weather. Mantel’s people endure because they are never symbols for long. They sulk, misjudge, misremember, want the wrong thing for the right reason, or the right thing for reasons they’d be embarrassed to admit.
A useful working theory: characters become lovable to write when you stop asking what they represent and start tracking what costs them something. Cost sharpens attention. A character who pays—socially, bodily, morally, temporally—starts to glow with consequence. That glow is affection’s cousin.
Another lever: let them surprise you. If you already know what they’ll say in a scene, they’re not alive yet; they’re rehearsing lines for a tribunal. Give them a private agenda that slightly undermines the scene’s public purpose. Mantel often lets her people think one thing, say another, and do a third—triangulation creates depth, and depth breeds attachment.
Also: love arrives through specificity, not sympathy. The exact way someone pours tea when anxious. The phrase they never quite finish. The lie they repeat so often it becomes scaffolding. These are not decorative details; they’re moral fingerprints. When you notice them closely, affection follows—almost despite yourself.
Given your own archive of diaries, photographs, places, and long attention to lived texture, you already possess the raw material Mantel trusted: accumulated witness. The task isn’t to compress it into a single “spot” too early, but to let individuals step forward from the crowd and claim their peculiar gravity. Shape comes later. Love precedes structure.
In other words: stop trying to finish them. Let them remain, for now, work pending.
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