Cardboard Chacter

“You can’t design a character too specifically.” – Lee Child

Cardboard Character

During the holiday period this season I was able to enjoy some time reading a book by one of my favorite authors.  I’ve admired his work for a long time so I also took an opportunity to learn from his three conclusions about being a successful writer.

His “most confounding” conclusion struck a real chord with me:  “You can’t design a character too specifically.” 

Perhaps this was so striking to me because of the New Year.  Many use the New Year to write goals and make resolutions.  I’ve always thought doing so was helpful and a good thing to do.  But now, Lee Child has given me a new way to look at developing my own character.

“To think too carefully would produce a laundry list of imagined qualities and virtues and would result in a flat, boring, cardboard character.”  Lee wrote.  “I would be consulting a mental checklist – ‘I need to satisfy this demographic . . . check . . . and please these people . . . check . . .’ – until I had a guy with all the spark and life beaten out of him.  So I quite self-consciously pushed that thirty-five year soup of ideas and influences into the distant background and decided to relax and see what would come along.”  He continued.

Now I’m not suggesting you and I stop making and keeping goals but, I am suggesting that perhaps we take some time to push some of the ideas and influences from our past back into the past so as to discover the spark of life again.  In this regard, I remember reading a quote from long-past-forty Cher some time ago.

“I never date men who are over forty because by the time a man reaches forty he is so beaten down by life that he’s forgotten how to dream.  He doesn’t have any dreams left.”

Of all the people living in today’s world you and I are the most capable of dreaming.  We’ve lived our lives in a culture of possibility.  And even though I sell real estate for a living, I don’t think the American Dream has ever simply been “to have a house with a white picket fence and a patch of dirt.”  The American Dream, to me, is that you and I have opportunity to cast off the false cultural & personal habits from our past so we can chase and live our dreams freely.  A cardboard character will never have or live a dream. 

So, I’m making a commitment to scrap all parts of myself that would be considered as cardboard character.  As your friend, I invite you to break free of living as the person other people think you should be and live the life you’ve only dreamt about.  “Decide to relax and see what comes along.” 

“Character is king. There are probably fewer than six books every century remembered specifically for their plots.  People remember characters.”

Let’s live memorable lives.  Let’s write our own character.  I’m excited to see who we are!