It’s rare to succeed (or fail) alone. There’s often a mentor, a rival, or even a savior somewhere in the mix. And that makes for a great story.

But if you’ve ever listened to a kindergartener endlessly expound on the playground drama of the day, you know…

Not. Every. Detail. Matters. 👏

This is especially true for “characters”. I call them characters, because here at Drunk Writing Advice, we’re crafting stories. And the people we talk about in stories are characters — even if they’re real humans.

When you're writing a true story about a real experience you had, it's natural to want to include all the details. You were there. You lived it. No one is a better expert on that story than you.

And those details often include, ya know, the other people who were there.

But introducing characters to your personal story is tricky. Today, we’re going to talk about when you should (and shouldn’t) add characters.

-Kristin 🍷

✏️ Sentence School: Some characters rule, others drool.

🥃 The Writer’s Pour: Questions to ask before introducing a character to your story.

🤖 Robot Pals: Squeeze all the damn juice out of your characters.

🎙️ Drunk Talk: Holy shit. He actually took accountability.

Today we’re going to review three reasons you should introduce characters to a story, and one big reason you shouldn’t.

But first, let’s start with something basic: if a character is critical to driving the narrative forward, then yes, of course you should include them. 

If the story doesn’t make any damn sense without that person’s actions or point-of-view, then they’re in. But try to go deeper than that. 

Here’s how:

In this Drunk Business Advice story from last year, I introduced the characters of:

I was sandwiched between them. Here’s how the story went down:

Shortly after I and a few other senior leaders had quit, the burned-out employee had also had enough, and decided to quit himself. In an effort to save her reputation from being damaged by the mass exodus that was occurring as a result of her toxic leadership, my manipulative boss spread a rumor that he had quit because of “mental health issues”.

Diabolical. 

And trust me — if you read it, you won’t just dislike or distrust her, you’ll hate her.

In another story from last year, I introduced the characters of George, Bill, and Frank — prospective clients I was pitching in a terrifying meeting. And it was the absolute best way to raise the stakes. 

I was a little 20-something female sitting in a board room with three men who were old enough to be my father. 

While introducing three characters like that might be too distracting for such a short story, they were presented as a unit to add tension to the scene, which worked very well in this case.

In that same story, these characters enabled me to illustrate a pivotal turn when one of the men, Frank, swung to my side.

He stopped me from giving away too much value for free, and encouraged the others to hire me, which was a huge part of the story’s overarching lesson.

We have a natural human tendency to honor those who were “around” during an experience we’re relaying as a story. Let go of that.

Imagine you’re hearing the story for the first time — you have no context, and you’re consuming the details as they’re given. All of a sudden, John, Jerry, and Jenny are thrown in. 

Why? Because they were there. And they’re the storyteller’s pals, so they couldn’t be left out! But to the rest of us, they’re clutter — dispensable details distracting us from the point that’s being made.

Not every story will have characters outside of your own narration. Sometimes a story is more self-reflective in nature, and that’s totally fine.

Characters should only be introduced if they’re critical to the story, and you should always look for ways to use them to drive an emotional response, raise the stakes, or show transformation.

Make us adore them, detest them, or laugh at their contributions. But don’t include them simply because they were in the room where it happened.

Dive into some exercises to put what you’ve just learned about characters into practice. 👇️

The most effective way to improve any story is to do one thing—

Raise the stakes.

And characters are a powerful tool to help you demonstrate higher stakes. But you gotta squeeze all the juice out of them. AI can help.

Next time you write a story with characters, run it through this prompt for maximum juice:

Last week in this section, I vented about reliability issues I’ve been having with the platform on which I’ve built my newsletter program — Beehiiv.

And last night, I finally got a chance to talk to the CEO, Tyler Denk.

It was a really good talk. Tyler took full responsibility for the outages I had experienced, and in two out of the three cases, was able to point to direct causes where he admitted that new code had been pushed into production too quickly.

“We were trying to move fast and not break things, but unfortunately we did. If I could go back in time, I would have done another couple weeks of testing before pushing those updates.”

He offered apologies, but more importantly, he outlined steps they’re taking to improve reliability at Beehiiv, including:

Finally, he opened a direct line of communication, telling me that if I ever experience any other major issues, or simply want to discuss feature improvements, to email him directly.

Y’all — this eases my mind a lot. Tyler didn’t make excuses, or downplay the reliability issues. He took accountability and action.

Will the reliability improve? We’ll see. But for now, I feel reassured enough to stick with Beehiiv for a while, and give them a chance to be better.

I don’t take my place in your inbox for granted.

It’s an honor to be welcomed into your world, and I know I have to work to continue to earn it, week after week. So if you have feedback, or if there’s a topic you want me to cover, just hit reply and tell me!

And if you love Drunk Writing Advice, consider sharing it with a friend. 🥰