By Amanda Cox
As an author with a background in counseling, I love nothing more than digging deep into a character’s childhood and defining moments. I then use those elements to analyze that character’s fears and motivations to create impactful plot points.
For the most part, I find my counselor’s perspective to be helpful, but I have to remind myself that my characters don’t exist inside a constant therapy session. They shouldn’t be as aware of themselves as I am.
In fact, I must ensure my characters aren’t in on all the knowledge I’ve collected about them!
If you, likewise, enjoy fleshing out the backstory, it can be tough to be judicious with what you know. After having so much fun figuring out what makes your characters tick, it’s tempting to lay all of it out there for the reader. Resist that temptation! Even though you know why your characters are choosing certain behaviors, they shouldn’t have that information—at least not fully . . . not yet . . . not if we want them to read like real people.
Generally, you and I have an established way of interacting with the world and a way of thinking that is normal to us. We aren’t walking around in an ongoing state of self-reflection. Those of us who are introverts tend to be more prone to frequent introspection than our extroverted counterparts, but most of us are not in a constant state of connecting our thoughts and behavior to events in our lives. We also all have blind spots—things other people notice about us of which we are unaware. If our goal is to create characters who feel like real people, it is important to keep this in mind.
Think about the moments in your life that caused you to stop what you were doing and analyze your thoughts, feelings, or emotions. Maybe you experienced an “inciting incident” in your life, or a person you trusted spoke into your life and pointed something out that you were previously blind to. This might have resulted in denial, a moment of reflection, or an entire season in which you became more focused on personal growth. Use external elements in your plot to bring out the internal development in your characters.
As we create character arcs, we can give both experiences to our characters—small events that lead to small revelations (or maybe even denial), which prepare them for a climactic moment later in the story. This is where all the work developing the character’s backstory comes into play. We can tailor the events in the story to connect in a meaningful way to the wounds our characters carry.
Trust your reader! Part of the fun of reading comes through collecting all the little crumbs the author has strategically sprinkled throughout the story. It is a far more engaging experience than reading an entire paragraph of your character analyzing their past.
So how self-aware should our characters be? Perhaps the opening chapter shows your character has landed in a place in life that is uncomfortable. However, the protagonist might not fully realize why that new circumstance is rubbing them the wrong way, prompting them to move in another direction. At least not when your reader initially meets them! They shouldn’t analyze their every move, connecting it with some past event (unless an obsession with self-analyzation is their character flaw . . . which could be pretty entertaining).
To help our characters feel authentic, they must have blind spots and flaws they aren’t fully aware of and don’t fully understand. Make sure you as the author are the only one holding all the information when the story begins, and be strategic with the revelations!
Amanda Cox is a three-time Christy award-winning author whose novels include ECPA bestsellers Between the Sound and Sea, The Bitter End Birding Society, and He Should Have Told the Bees. Amanda will teach “Character Creation from a Counselor’s Perspective” at the upcoming CCW Spring Conference (Virtual), Saturday, March 14, 2026 (9:00 AM–4:30 PM).
