In Chapter Ten of The Making of a Story, Alice LaPlante focuses on being able to create engaging characters. Her main idea is that characters are the soul of a story, and that good writing depends on how well readers can connect to them. LaPlante explains that stories come alive when writers focus on who their characters are and how they would respond to certain scenarios. Throughout the chapter, she emphasizes that readers care more about who things happen to and less about what actually happens. 

LaPlante explains that convincing characters are built through detail. She distinguishes good and bad characters by either calling them round or flat. Flat characters stay the same throughout the story. Round characters surprise us because they have complex thoughts and feelings. They sometimes contradict themselves and as a result create problems for themselves. It is better to use particular details that show personality. For example, you could describe a character as “angry”, but it does not create any emotion that readers can feel. Instead of saying “angry”, you could say “he gripped the steering wheel until his knuckles whitened.” Every character should also have a reason for doing something. The moment that reason meets a conflict, a story begins. 

Readers respond well to characters who make decisions based on their own complex thoughts, because it gives them a sense of life. When a writer pays attention to the things that a character does, such as nervous tics, the result is a story that feels lived in rather than fake. She also connects these lessons to creative nonfiction, explaining that even when the “characters” are real people, writers still need to portray them with vividness. She wants writers to understand that you do not create a plot and base the characters on it. You create characters and base the plot on their actions. When we fully understand a character’s motivation, their choices form the story naturally. 

Her advice made me realize that I sometimes focus too much on plot rather than the people inside it. During our creative nonfiction section, my thought process every time was “Okay what’s the plot gonna be and how should I go about things happening.” This created a bad habit of focusing on all the wrong things. I never once started my story by thinking of a well-rounded character and imagining what they would do in certain situations. 

Overall, Chapter Ten reminds me that storytelling is really just about understanding people. Her emphasis on specificity and contradiction helps writers create characters who stay with the reader even after they are done reading. Her chapter taught me to approach my writing in certain steps, and helped me understand that characters create the story, not the other way around.