ARE YOUR CHARACTERS IDIOTS? An important writing lesson from Alien: Covenant

ART by RBT. Check out the artist's website and instagram.

MASSIVE SPOILERS FOR: Alien: Covenant

​So are your characters idiots?
Because that’s not good.

Unless they are meant to be idiots. As in you have intentionally written them to be idiots.
Then it is okay.
 ​
Otherwise, you can ask yourself this interesting question, which someone asked me recently;

 If the world you have written was real, how would your characters (or plot / events etc) actually be?
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​To explain this idea, I turn your attention to the 2017 movie, 'Alien: Covenant', which stars a group of highly trained professionals. I'm talking pilots, medics, scientists etc. These people have literally spent years of their lives studying their chosen fields, and now have been selected by a multi-billion dollar corporation to take part in (what I can only imagine is) a highly paid and coveted position.

​Basically these characters are placed in charge of two thousand innocent lives heading to distant planet on a colonization mission.​

So what if this world was actually real? ​ ​Just for a moment, imagine it...

​If the world of ‘Alien’ was real, imagine the extreme vetting program that would take place to select these extraordinary individuals.

Think how seriously they must surely take their roles and responsibilities as part of this once in a lifetime mission, which is a one way ticket away from everything and everyone they have ever known. 

​Imagine what kind of people they would really be...
 
Now consider the actual actions of these people within this story:

• Arrive at a completely untested and unknown planet. It is oxygenated and they can breathe, so they go ahead and visit the surface without any kind of suit. (What about unknown pathogens? What about alien diseases they could not possibly prepare for, to which they would have zero immunity? What about sending a drone down to map the surface first? What about not splitting up while traversing unknown, possibly hostile, territory?)

 

• Stumble across an actual enormous abandoned alien spacecraft. Never once get excited or surprised by the first sign of alien life that humanity has ever found proof of.  Instead just take it in their stride and crawl around inside it. WITH NO MASKS ON!

 

• Some of the crew begin to get inexplicably sick. Instead of alerting their comrades, they keep insisting they are fine. Even though they have no idea if they are fine, and they could potentially be infected with any sort of alien virus. Who even cares about quarantine? No one, that's who.

 

• Scary alien stuff happening. Everywhere. Woman scientist takes a break. Goes and rinses her wounded arms in some totally random water she just found sitting inside a citadel belonging to a dead alien race. Even though her friends keep getting infected with some sort of mysterious virus. Open flesh, weird alien water. What a fucking wonderful idea. 

 
So.... it doesn’t make sense. Those people just don't make sense.

They acted illogically, they made decisions I cannot believe intelligent people would ever make.

And what does this do to a story?

It makes the entire thing completely unbelievable, despite how beautifully it was shot, despite the incredible imagery and exciting mix of scifi and horror. Those character inconsistencies ruined the entire story, because I could no longer believe it was real.
​Those inconsistencies broke me out of the spell.


So what have I learned?
 

I think the lesson is to understand that the world you are creating in your novel is a real place.
It could be a mad fantasy or a scifi epic with radically different rules completely removed from our own universe.
Or it could be a crime story set in a normal city in 2017. 

No matter the setting, your world has rules.  
​And within your world, those rules have to be real.

I found this next quote interesting and helpful:


​For every fantastical trait or ability a character has, the author has to work harder to make sure the reader still believes in them.
If they push it too far, the reader will simply switch off from the character, or even the entire story.

— Aaron Miles, quote from 'Keeping Characters Realistic In A Fantasy Setting'. 


Obviously this quote is talking about a character's traits or abilities within, for instance, a fantasy novel. Yet this same principle can be applied to the environment you set your novel in too.
If you have a story set in a realistic version of earth's future, where science and technology have not been made redundant by magic, and you choose to populate your story with scientist characters, then your readers have to be able to believe that your scientist characters are actually smart scientists.

It is that simple.

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So perhaps what I have learned from this, is to challenge myself with the following questions, every time I write a story: 

If this was a real world and my characters were real people, would they still make the same choices?

Would they still act the same way and want the same things?


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And finally, one last helpful quote:

When writing a novel a writer should create living people; people, not characters.
​A character is a caricature.

- Ernest Hemingway.
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