One of my biggest personal challenges in writing is trying not to cross the fine line between telling a meaningful story and being “preachy.” To some extent, this ties in with my previous post-in order for a story to be anything but mindless drivel, there needs to be some kind of substance underlying the action. But that substance has to be something more than the author’s having an agenda and filling in the roles needed to push that agenda. All the characters-protagonists, antagonists, minor characters-need to have depth and well-thought-out, well-articulated motivations for all their actions; in a certain sense, they can’t simply fit the predefined roles I set for them. The characters’ attitudes towards issues of Life, the Universe and Everything need to be their own, generated by their experiences throughout the story. I want my characters to speak for themselves, rather than just voicing my opinions-if only because, when I’m being purposefully preachy, my characters come off as shallow and readers won’t even care about them, much less about the message they’re supposed to be transmitting.

I figured this out after the first few drafts of the novel I’m currently querying. I started off with a character who had no other purpose or function than to be the “bad guy.” After those first drafts I began to realize he was nothing more than a caricature-pretty much your stereotypical mwuah-ha-ha-ing mustachio’d villain, and one of the weakest links in the entire story. It required extensive shuffling and rewriting, but I reworked his character arc, gave him a human side, added a few shades of gray. Now, fourish drafts in, he’s still the antagonist, but he’s no longer the color-by-numbers villain I generated solely so that my protagonist’s untainted honor could shine. His motivations are as complex as my protagonist’s, and the story is stronger for it.

In short, for a story to be meaningful, characters need to have their own organic reasons for their actions. They shouldn’t just do what they do because I, as the author, “need” a villain in this particular story or a conflict in this particular scene.