One of the things I find some writers struggle with is a fear of creating characters who are “too weird” to be “believable.” Whenever I hear this, I love to have them sit down and watch the two-hour movie debut of the old and short-lived ABC TV mystery, Twin Peaks.
There’s no one weirder than that cast of characters, in general. And of them, few are odder ducks than the Log Lady. And yet, over 15 years after it went off the air, it is characters like the Log Lady who I still remember most clearly from that show. She’s indelibly etched into my computer memory. And it wasn’t until deep into the series that you were told why she talked to the log she always carried around; her backstory, once revealed, made her all the more memorable.
So there’s two lessons to be learned: don’t be afraid to let at least some of your characters be so weird that you begin to wonder if they’re realistic. They don’t have to be, not completely. They just have to be sympathetic in the long run.
And the other lesson is: don’t reveal backstory too soon or two completely. If we’d known all there was to know about the Log Lady in that first two hours of Twin Peaks, she wouldn’t have been nearly as fascinating as the mystery of her made her.
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