Layering Character for Believable Fiction

Layering: the deepest, richest, most compelling aspect of character 

We hear a lot of talk about “layering” as a storytelling device. The more layers a character has, the more complex and individual they are, allowing authors to sidestep cliché and create cast members that are interesting, unique, and compelling. So let’s talk about some effective ways that we can use layering with our characters.

Layering Character with Behavior

All layering is based in the character’s needs.

Louisa May Alcott created layers to Jo March. We all believe Jo is gutsy, tough, smart, creative, and adventurous. Heck, yes. She put the “Oh, boy!” in tomboy. So what gives Jo her layering?

Her tenderness.

Sometimes Jo is wreaking havoc with Laurie, sometimes sassing Marmee, and sometimes swashbuckling around taking off pirate heads in the most dastardly, unladylike way.

However, when Beth is dying, Jo drops everything—reading to her, caring for her, holding her hand and watching her slip away with tears in her eyes. 

This is the layering that makes Jo a three-dimensional character and allows her to step off the page into the lives of her readers. 

We really do vacillate between our tough outer shells and the things that move our hearts. We do both flout authority and spontaneously give of ourselves. We do both make stupid mistakes and accidentally create flashes of light in another’s darkness. These details—the ways in which we act out our values— are the stuff of fiction.

Layering Character with Confusion

Eugene Henderson is an extraordinarily ordinary person. He’s a hearty, good-natured American businessperson who goes on business trips. In fact, he goes on a business trip to Africa. 

When Saul Bellow sent him, in Henderson the Rain King, on a bizarre pilgrimage into the African foothills in search of an elusive tribe, he wanted Henderson blind to himself because he knew that confusion often leads to epiphany.

So he gave Henderson surface motivation to venture into that African wilderness. But he also gave him hidden motivation, a reason for going on this pilgrimage that an ordinary man like Henderson wouldn’t have: an unacknowledged longing to discover something more in life. 

Eventually, the confusion Henderson has about his own hidden side leads him not only to the obscure tribe, but to the tribe’s inexplicable ritual for calling rain, a ritual in which Henderson—precisely because of the qualities of innocent heartiness and good nature that make a him an ordinary businessperson—becomes inevitably entangled.

And the next thing Henderson knows, he’s gotten into an experience that would be strange as hell even for the most conscientiously bizarre. Henderson has accidentally become the tribe’s new Rain King.

Henderson’s transformation from ordinary businessperson to African Rain King is so implausible that it would be simply impossible if it weren’t for Bellows’ meticulous, matter-of-fact record of significant details, which allows the reader to experience the transformation with exactly the same level of oblivion and insight as Henderson. By the time Bellows is done with us, we are Henderson the Rain King, trapped in an inexplicable reality from which we have no escape. 

Layering Character with Two Classical Needs

Vincent Parry is a canonical protagonist, caught between his need to live and his need to love. And I can’t begin to tell you how much fiction—great literature, pulp—has been created through layering these two most classical needs: survival and love.

David Goodis sent Parry into his story in Dark Passage, as so many protagonists are sent, running for his life from very real danger on page one. Violence! Injustice! Death! Oh, no! 

We all believe enthusiastically in a character’s need to survive.

At the same time, almost the first person Parry meets is a babe. Flirtation! Sex! Passion! 

We also believe with all our hearts in a character’s need to love.

So Parry’s two conflicting needs are not unique to him at all. They’re common to every human animal. Back and forth, throughout the story, Goodis tosses Parry between these two most classical needs: survival, love—survival, love.

Every time Parry thinks he’s on top of survival, something crops up in his need for love: his best friend dies mysteriously shortly after Parry visits him, then a woman he once rejected surfaces.

And every time Parry thinks he’s on top of love, his life is threatened again: a Nosy Parker turns up, someone begins stalking Parry and the babe.

Until eventually Parry must choose between his safety and his passion for the babe—the only possible Climax for this story.

We recognize this, don’t we? Of course we do. Irene Némirovsky used exactly the same needs—survival, love—for her gorgeous story, Dolce, although otherwise the two stories couldn’t be more different. James M. Cain used them for The Postman Always Rings Twice. Emily Brontё twisted the daylights out of them for Wuthering Heights.

A protagonist trapped between their need for survival and their need for love is one of the few eternal plots that we have. When layered with all the myriad significant details of existence and humanity, they become an infinity of stories. 

This is just the tip of the iceberg, really. There are so many ways to add depth and dimension to our characters. What other layering options have you found effective?