Today’s post is by Michelle Barker and David Griffin Brown.
Picture a detective who’s seen it all. Gruff, world-weary, drinks too much. He’s got a quip for every occasion and a past he doesn’t talk about, but chances are there’s a dame involved.
Sound familiar?
Now picture a nurse. Competent, compassionate, long-suffering. Her patients love her. She works too hard and thinks of herself last. Probably single and taking care of an elderly parent at home.
Also familiar.
These characters aren’t people. They’re roles wearing people-suits. The detective isn’t doing detective things because of who he is—he’s doing them because that’s what detectives do. Ditto the nurse. They have all the external markers of a human being but none of the interior landscape that makes them interesting and unique.
Jean-Paul Sartre had a name for this. He called it a personnage, which translated from the French means a character. But what he really meant by it is more like a role.
The waiter who wasn’t quite real
Sartre’s distinction between personne and personnage appears in his 1943 work Being and Nothingness, where he describes a Parisian waiter performing his job with such studied precision (the careful choreography of his movements, the slightly-too-formal posture, the practiced smile) that he has become the role. He isn’t a person who happens to be waiting tables. He is a waiter, fully and only.
For Sartre, this was a philosophical problem. The waiter is engaged in what he called bad faith: a departure from the anxiety of being an authentic self into the comfortable cage of a role. The role tells him who he is and what to do. It’s like living a paint-by-numbers life. Easy, because there’s no ambiguity involved, but the price for this simplicity is a lack of freedom and no nuance. No risk, true, but also no reward.
Of course, Sartre didn’t write Being and Nothingness as a craft guide for novelists, but it turns out his insights are very valuable for writers because we do this to our characters all the time.
The comfortable cage
When we’re building a character, roles are efficient. They’re like a shorthand that orients the reader quickly and allows us to dispense with cumbersome backstory. We know what a detective does, what a grieving mother looks like, how a ruthless CEO behaves. We’ve seen hundreds of them, after all. The role arrives pre-loaded with behavioral expectations, and we lean on those expectations because they work—up to a point.
The problem is that a character defined entirely by their role is, in Sartre’s terms, a personnage. Generic. A type rather than a person. By relying solely on the role to describe what they do, we miss getting to the essence of who they are.
Stock photography provides some good examples of this. The smiling doctor in scrubs. The businesswoman mid-laugh. The construction worker with a hard hat and a thumbs up. These images aren’t inaccurate, but they don’t portray a specific, nuanced human being. They are people portrayed as their roles, forgettable the moment you scroll past them.
Compare that to a photograph taken of someone who didn’t know the camera was on them, caught mid-sentence at a party, gesticulating, laughing at their own anecdote. They are unguarded, uncomposed. Maybe a little weird. Even if you don’t know this person, you believe in them completely, because they aren’t posing or performing for this picture. There is an authentic person on display rather than a role.
That’s the difference between a personnage and a personne. Paradoxically, the personnage is universal, but it’s the specificity and uniqueness of the personne that readers most fully relate to. The trick to bridging this gap involves more than just giving your doctor character a wisp of backstory and a preference for decaf lattes. It’s about showing us the real person hiding behind the role.
Four ways to break the role
So how do we transform a personnage into a personne? It starts with asking what purpose the role is serving—not for the story, but for the character. Why have they taken refuge in it? What does it protect them from?
Once we know that, then we can mess with it.
1. Let them fail the role
This is perhaps the simplest and most effective move. Philip Marlowe in The Big Sleep is supposed to be a detached, cynical private eye, but he keeps making choices that aren’t in his financial interest because he actually cares about people. He fails the role of the mercenary detective, and it’s that failure that makes him three-dimensional. In Moby-Dick, Ahab is supposed to be a captain, which means one thing above all else: bring the ship home. He fails that role catastrophically, and he knows it and doesn’t care—because vengeance matters more to him than duty. The failure is the point.
2. Let them overcompensate
There’s a particular kind of character who performs their role so completely and relentlessly that the performance starts to curdle. Jay Gatsby throws parties he doesn’t enjoy for people he doesn’t like in a house that doesn’t feel like a home—all because the role of “self-made man of mystery” demands it. It’s a means to an end. If he can convincingly adopt the role, he can win Daisy back. Or so he thinks.
3. Let them refuse the role
Jane Eyre refuses the role of the grateful dependent. Hester Prynne refuses the role of the shamed penitent. When a character refuses their role, the question becomes: what are they willing to lose for that refusal? The answer to that question can fuel a powerful plot.
4. Let them embrace the role—but show us why
Vito Corleone in The Godfather fully inhabits the role of patriarch, of don. But Puzo lets us see the logic underneath it: the immigrant’s fight for security and respect, the belief that the world will take everything from you if you don’t fight back, the dedication to legacy, to family. His role is a response to everything life forced upon him.
When we can demonstrate the real person who inhabits the role, the personnage becomes a personne and the role becomes far more interesting.
It’s also worth noting that a role should only be one dimension of a fully developed character. If we’re not careful, we can pigeonhole a character into their role so that it dictates more of their personality than it should. While it makes sense for a doctor to think like a doctor, we can also allow them to break out of their role and enjoy hot dogs and baseball games. A writer might want to correct the missing apostrophes on the graffiti they see, but they might also be into horoscopes or have a weird obsession with the circus. People are odd and fascinating. Our characters should be that way, too.
The question beneath the role
Here’s a diagnostic tool you can apply to any character: if they’re taking refuge in their role, what are they afraid of?
It’s worth sitting with that question, because the answer is rarely what it first appears. Ahab’s role is “captain,” but his fear isn’t of failure or mutiny. It’s of meaninglessness, the possibility that suffering is random and undeserved. The white whale isn’t just a whale. It’s proof that the universe is indifferent. Ahab’s role as the relentless, monomaniacal captain is his (futile) defense against that truth.
Emma Bovary’s role is as “Charles’s wife”—a role she quickly comes to hate and escapes through fantasy, debt, and affairs. But what is she actually afraid of? Obscurity. Mediocrity. The possibility that she will never attain the romantic life she’s read about in novels. Her role suffocates her because it’s the thing that proves her fears true.
When you can answer the question—what are your characters afraid of?—you’ll find that the role they’re playing suddenly makes a different kind of sense. Rather than being a mere costume, it’s more like armor.
In practice
Look at the characters in your current project. What role is each of them playing? Now ask yourself: is this a personnage or a personne?
If it’s a personnage, don’t despair. You just need to dig a bit deeper. Examine their role, find the fear beneath it, and then decide: will this character fail their role, overcompensate, refuse it, or reveal the wound that made them embrace it in the first place?
The answer to that question will lead you to who your character really is, and that’s who the reader wants to get to know.
David Griffin Brown and Michelle Barker are co-authors of Story Skeleton: The Classics and Immersion and Emotion: The Two Pillars of Storytelling.
David Griffin Brown founded DarlingAxe.com in 2018, and as part of his Book Broker interview series, he has compiled querying advice from over 100 literary agents. He is an award-winning short fiction writer with over twenty-five years’ experience as an editor. He holds a BA in anthropology (UVic) and an MFA in creative writing (UBC). David lives in Victoria, Canada, on the traditional territory of the Esquimalt and Songhees Nations.
Michelle is the author of The House of One Thousand Eyes, a YA historical novel which won numerous awards and was named a Kirkus Best Book of the Year. She has published two other YA novels, a picture book, short fiction, non-fiction, and poetry. She has an MFA in creative writing and works as a senior editor at The Darling Axe. Michelle lives in Vancouver, Canada, on the unceded territories of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh nations. Find her at MichelleBarker.ca
