Common Writing Mistakes: Couch Potato Characters

Welcome back to my series: Common Mistakes Made By New Writers (Like Me). This is part four: Couch Potato Characters or Characters Who Never Move. Feel free to read back through previous posts to read about information dumps, battling backstory and characters who talk to themselves. It’s not necessary to read these posts in any particular order, but I hope you find them useful in your own writing.

Today we’re going to grapple with couch potato characters. One problem that I have seen other new writers (and myself) make is that we focus exclusively on what our characters are thinking and often neglect what they are doing. Sometimes we will write long sections of dialogue or interior monologue and forget that our character has a body that is taking up physical space. A bit of physical action can be even more useful in showing our character’s true colors.

I remember reading Bryan Davis’ novel, Raising Dragons to my kids. In the very first chapter he describes his main character — a teen boy — coming down the stairs to breakfast.

Billy rubbed the purring cat one more time and then bounded down the stairs, jackhammering every second stair on the way down. With a long-legged leap, he skipped the last four steps, bringing his tennis shoes in for a slap landing against the wood floor.

The author could have spent pages describing him and telling us how he was an average teen (except for a disturbing fire-breathing ability), but instead he used Billy’s physical motion to show us his boy-inside-the-man character.

So, your assignment is to examine your own characters. Look for sections where you have delved too deeply into your character’s head, but left her body sitting on the couch staring blankly, perhaps with a bead of drool on her lip. Get him or her moving — even if it is slight. Have her twirl her hair or have him bouce his knee. Anything! As your characters burn a few calories, they may even thank you. Ah, I needed that — I was starting to stiffen up!