November 8, 2024 • 6 min read
The difference between a character you forget and a character who stays with you often comes down to one thing: how they behave when everything goes wrong.
Anyone can write a character going through their normal day. The real test is writing that same character when their world falls apart. That’s when you find out who they really are. And that’s when readers decide whether they believe in them.
Start With Who They Were Before
Before you can write a character in crisis, you need to know who they were when life was normal. Not just the basics like their job and their family situation, but the deeper stuff. What do they believe about themselves? What do they believe about the world? What are the unspoken rules they live by?
With Johnny Allen, I knew he was someone who believed in fairness. He believed that if you worked hard and treated people decently, things would eventually work out. He believed in patience. He believed in keeping his head down and not making waves. These beliefs defined him for decades. And they’re exactly what the story would eventually dismantle.
Crisis doesn’t just test characters. It tests their beliefs. And when those beliefs fail them, that’s when the real transformation begins.
People Don’t Change Overnight
This is the mistake I see most often in thriller fiction. A character experiences something terrible and immediately becomes someone completely different. That’s not how people work.
In reality, our first response to crisis is usually denial. We try to maintain our normal patterns even when circumstances have fundamentally changed. We tell ourselves things will get better. We wait for someone else to fix the problem. We keep doing what we’ve always done, hoping for different results.
It’s only when these strategies fail repeatedly that change becomes possible. And even then, it happens in stages. A person doesn’t jump from law abiding citizen to something else in a single leap. They take small steps. Each step feels justified in the moment. Looking back, the journey seems inevitable. But living through it, each decision feels like the reasonable choice given the circumstances.
The Body Remembers
One thing that helps me write authentic crisis response is remembering that stress lives in the body, not just the mind. When your character is under pressure, they’re not just thinking differently. They’re feeling different physically.
Sleep patterns change. Appetite changes. Small physical habits emerge or disappear. The jaw clenches. The shoulders tighten. These details might seem minor, but they’re the difference between a character who feels real and one who feels like a puppet being moved through a plot.
When I write Johnny during his difficult periods, I try to put myself in his body as much as his mind. What does it feel like to lie awake at three in the morning, unable to stop thinking? What does it feel like to sit across from someone who’s wronged you and have to pretend everything is fine? The physical reality of stress is what makes it believable on the page.
Empathy Is Everything
Here’s the uncomfortable truth about writing characters in crisis: you have to understand them from the inside, even when their actions are wrong. Especially when their actions are wrong.
This doesn’t mean condoning what they do. It means understanding the logic that leads them there. Every character believes they’re doing the right thing, or at least the necessary thing. Your job as a writer is to understand that belief system well enough to make it feel real, even to readers who would never make the same choices.
The characters who haunt us long after we finish a book are the ones where we can see ourselves, just a little bit, even in their darkest moments. That recognition is what makes fiction powerful. And it’s only possible when the writer has done the hard work of truly understanding their characters from the inside out.