I needed a way to make a few bucks while I applied to graduate school, and given my love for food and cooking, I figured a restaurant environment would be a fun and easy place to do that.

Waitressing certainly wasn’t easy and it wasn’t exactly fun, at least not in the traditional sense. But I did learn some life lessons — like that when your manager descends into the basement for long periods of time and returns with white powder on his face, that white powder is not merely “dust” — and I met some very interesting people.

One of those people was our busboy, Mussie. Mussie was an Ethiopian Jew who had made his way to America a few decades earlier, after fleeing Ethiopia in the late ‘70s during the Red Terror.

On my first day, he eyed me skeptically and barely spoke two words to me, speaking instead through one of the other waitresses.

On my second day, he discovered I was Jewish and wanted to be a journalist. His eyes lit up. “My Jewish princess!” he cried. From then on, he treated me like his own daughter.

Mussie was a complicated man. He was generous and compassionate but extremely private. He loved Tim Russert and hated Cokie Roberts and read the newspaper every day. He had a major gambling problem and many debts. He was also an alcoholic. Every night at 9:00 on the nose, he would pull a beer out of the mini-fridge in the galley and slug it down. If work was too busy, and he couldn’t get his 9:00 beer, things got a little hairy.

The more I got to know Mussie, the more I loved him in all of his complexity. “Someday, I’ll model one of my fictional characters after him,” I told myself.

Basing fictional characters on real people

But when I sat down many years later to begin work on my novel, Mussie never made an appearance. In fact, none of the characters in my debut novel, The Girls’ Guide to Love and Supper Clubs, are based on real people.

And with the exception of one minor character, neither are the characters in my second novel. Why not?

This may sound counter-intuitive, but I’ve found it’s harder to write a multidimensional, realistic character if you base that character on a real person. Real people are complicated and unpredictable, and those complexities often don’t translate well onto the page.

Take Mussie. He is generous, compassionate, hard-working, and conservative, but also weak, circumspect, and undisciplined. When confronted with a conflict — a necessary ingredient in any novel — which attribute would drive his response? One of them? All of them? A select combination?

With a fictional character, the writer can choose, but having such a large and conflicting group of traits makes the author’s job a lot harder. And, even worse, the reader will have trouble grasping the essence of the character if that character’s motivations and responses are constantly changing.

A better way to write complex characters is, ironically, to simplify them. Choose three attributes, preferably conflicting ones, and allow those attributes to drive your character’s actions throughout the story.

Creating complex characters through simplicity

For example, in my debut, the main character, Hannah, is outspoken, risk-averse, and passionate about cooking. One of those characteristics drives every decision she makes, and the others add tension.

So when she decides to start an underground (and questionably legal) restaurant out of her landlord’s townhouse, that decision is driven by her passion for cooking.

But because she is risk-averse in every other aspect of her life, I have added a layer of tension to the story: Hannah knows what she’s doing is wrong, and she is conflicted about it. She is also afraid to stand up to her parents and tell them she wants to go to culinary school — risk-averse! — which adds complexity to her character because she is generally so outspoken.

Think through some of your favorite characters in literature. My guess is, despite all of those characters’ seeming complexity, you can boil down their personalities into about three traits.

Harry Potter, Raskolnikov, Owen Meany, Bridget Jones, Humbert Humbert — all of these characters seem larger than life, and yet we feel as if we “know” them because their authors have brought them into crisp focus for us.

Real people have numerous personality traits, and off the page, your fictional characters should too. But on the page, simplify your characters’ motivations, and you’ll end up with layered characters that will bring your story to life.

How do you approach the challenge of creating complex and interesting characters?

This is an updated version of a story that was previously published. We update our posts as often as possible to ensure they’re useful for our readers.

Photo via LOGVINYUK YULIIA / Shutterstock 

Maybe, if I were lucky, the book would be reviewed by The New York Times and shortlisted for a few awards. My former classmates would read the book and tell me it brought them to tears, and my name would be mentioned in the same breath as Anne Tyler and Richard Russo. Perhaps Jeffrey Eugenides would invite me around for tea.

I will be the first to admit these ambitions were both unrealistic and steeped in snobbery.

But at the time — and even now — those were the types of books and authors praised by the literary establishment. If I wanted my fellow Yale grads to take me seriously as a writer, clearly that was the kind of book I needed to write.

And then I sat down in front of my laptop, and what came out was — to steal from my book cover — “Bridget Jones with a killer cinnamon bun recipe.” Ahem.

Here’s the thing: I loved Bridget Jones. No, make that present tense: I love Bridget Jones. I love books by Sophie Kinsella and Jennifer Weiner and lots of other authors who write so-called chick lit. So why is it any surprise that when I sat down, that’s what came out? And why, initially at least, did I try to resist it?

I’ll tell you why: because I worried my friends and family — and the public more generally — wouldn’t respect me as a writer if I wrote those kinds of books.

Ridiculous? Of course.

Unfair? Entirely.

But in a world where “chick lit” had become a pejorative term, and as a woman who had spent her life chasing intellectual pursuits, I had trouble reconciling the book I thought I should write with the book I was meant to write.

When everything changed for me and my story

Then one day, as I poked around Twitter for a few minutes, I came across a tweet from Jennifer Weiner.

I can’t remember the exact wording of her tweet or what, specifically, she was referring to, but the gist was this: the book chooses the writer, not the other way around.

At that moment, everything came into focus for me. I didn’t need to label the kind of book I was writing. Plenty of other people would do that for me. What I needed to do was write, to help the story that was bottle up inside of me escape. It didn’t matter if that story was chick lit or a gory thriller. What mattered was that I told my story, my way.

When it comes to writing fiction, there is so much talk about craft and form that it’s easy to start thinking you’re somehow cheating if the writing comes easily.

Believe me, even when the writing comes easily, crafting a novel is never easy. There will be hours and hours (and hours) of revisions. There will be scenes that don’t work and dialogue that falls flat. There will be times when you wonder if your story is, in fact, the worst novel ever written.

Maybe it is, and maybe it isn’t. But I guarantee it isn’t nearly as bad as it would be if you tried to write something other than the book living inside you.

So shut out all of the voices, real and imagined, telling you to write a certain type of book or not to write another.

Write the book deep within you, and instead of trying to be the next Richard Russo or Anne Tyler or Jeffrey Eugenides, do something even better: Try to be the first you.

This is an updated version of a story that was previously published. We update our posts as often as possible to ensure they’re useful for our readers.

Photo via Vadim Georgiev / Shutterstock