Feedback Wanted
Some characters only work if you let their private logic stay partly hidden.
Explain too much and they flatten out into a neat little diagram of motives. Leave too much out and readers start kicking at the door. The tricky bit is that a person can make perfect sense in the moment and still look baffling once you try to explain them in prose.
Iām always torn between clarity and mystery here. A good line of thought can make a character feel real. Too much of it can make them feel managed.
Explain too much and they flatten out into a neat little diagram of motives. Leave too much out and readers start kicking at the door. The tricky bit is that a person can make perfect sense in the moment and still look baffling once you try to explain them in prose.
Iām always torn between clarity and mystery here. A good line of thought can make a character feel real. Too much of it can make them feel managed.
The mistake is often treating explanation as the same thing as understanding. A character can be legible in action and still resist a tidy account of why. That resistance is useful. People in real life are full of motives they would never phrase cleanly, even to themselves. Literature gets dull when everyone arrives with their own annotated bibliography.