I have a simple test for characters.
I imagine having coffee with them.
Nothing happens.
There is no mystery to solve. No message arrives. Nobody is watching from across the street. The waiter is not secretly connected to an organisation that disappeared twenty years ago.
It is just coffee.
The question is whether I would stay.
I began using this test without really intending to. Whenever I found myself thinking about a character, I noticed that I was placing them in ordinary situations.
Waiting for a train.
Sitting in a hotel lobby.
Walking through a city without a destination.
Having coffee.
These moments are inconvenient for weak characters.
Plot can hide a great deal.
Give someone a secret, a weapon, or a person chasing them and they immediately appear interesting. There is movement. There is danger. The reader has a reason to turn the page.
Remove all of that and something uncomfortable happens.
The character has to speak.
Worse, they have to listen.
I think conversation reveals more about a character than almost anything else. Not because people always tell the truth when they speak.
Quite the opposite.
People avoid questions. They change subjects. They make jokes at inappropriate moments. They answer something slightly different from what was asked.
Sometimes the most important line in a conversation is the one nobody responds to.
This is where I begin to understand a character.
Would they complain about the coffee?
Would they notice the couple arguing quietly near the window?
Would they sit facing the door without knowing why?
Would they allow silence to exist, or immediately try to fill it?
Small decisions.
But characters are built from small decisions.
I have become suspicious of characters who are only interesting when something dramatic is happening to them.
Life is mostly the space between dramatic events.
A train is late.
The coffee is cold.
Someone tells a story you have already heard and you decide whether to interrupt them.
If a character disappears in those moments, I probably do not know them well enough yet.
So I return to the coffee shop.
I put them at a table.
I remove the mystery.
I remove the danger.
I remove the plot.
Then I sit down across from them.
If I still want to hear what they have to say, the character might be ready.
If not, I order another coffee.
There is still work to do.
— D. Vaen