The Unlikely Spy: How to Create a Compelling Character

Identifying a Character's Needs vs. Wants

Writers are often asked: Where did your story come from? What inspired you to write your novel?

Sometimes we start writing one story and end up writing a different story, one we never saw coming. This is what happened to me.

Back in 2020, while the world was shut-in with Covid, a voice came to me. It was a character waiting to be born. I grabbed a pad and a pen and began writing. Soon, she emerged on the page. She was anxious, lonely, and frustrated.

She had no direction in life. Her husband had died; he left her no money, so she needed to find work. Her friend, a kind policeman named Larsen, told her about a job in an orphanage in St. Croix called the Queen Louise Home for Children. They were short of people, he said. They needed someone to devote themselves to the care of the children several days a week if she was willing. She told him she was willing, and thus accepted the challenge. And so, it began. However, during her first week of work, while staying in a nearby hotel, she meets a man who offers her a job to provide inside information about a local German shipping company, the Hamburg-America Line, for a nice fee. She is torn: What should I do?

The Queen Louise Home for Children in Frederiksted, St. Croix. 

The narrative I wrote in the orphanage is beautiful. I loved the descriptions of the children, the building, the sounds of laughter and singing, and their innocent faces. But the story that grabbed me more was the story of how this unlikely lady became a spy. This was the story I needed to tell. So, after many months, I reworked the narrative around a lady who is groomed to be a spy for the Americans, but who needed to learn a valuable lesson about living a committed life. Because in order to reap the benefits of a committed life, one must first learn the value of commitment. This was the lesson my spy lady, Emma Christensen, needed to learn. But she did not arrive at this truth while working at the orphanage. She learned it while spying for the Americans. She learned it while sacrificing her life to thwart a dangerous spy ring that was intent on sabotaging the Panama Canal. Eventually, she took this knowledge and applied it to other areas of her life and changed her life for the better. Because, let’s face it, fiction is a lesson in life.

Fort Christian, an iconic building that dominates Charlotte Amalie.

Armistice Day, St. Thomas, Virgin Islands.

The Hamburg-America Line dock and coal depot on Hassel Island in the harbor of Charlotte Amalie, St. Thomas.

The A Story and the B Story

In any novel, a character sets out on a journey. He wants to achieve something. This is the A story. This is the external story of the character, their goal. But inside, they need something more. That is the B story. This is the internal part of the character’s journey. He is on a journey of discovery for some need that is intrinsic to his personhood. Only, he’s most likely not aware of it. Most of us go through life satisfying our external needs and wants, not realizing that our internal needs (or life lessons to be learned) are so much more important. They are what complete us as humans. They are what give us a meaningful life.

There are many internal needs: the need for acceptance, the need to forgive, the need to love, the need to trust, the need to believe in oneself, the need to believe in a higher cause, the need to redeem oneself, etc. Characters are no different from people. The character on the page is on a journey of discovery whether he knows it or not. To reach a satisfying conclusion at the end of a novel, they should have either achieved their “need,” discovered a new one, or rejected the need for something else. But they should be different in some way by the end of the story from where they were at the beginning. And each character will have a different outcome, positive or negative, since no two characters are the same.

One of the most famous fictional characters that comes to mind is Humphrey Bogart’s Rick in Casablanca. In the beginning of the movie, he is jaded and cynical, especially about love. He famously says, “I stick my neck out for no one.” But by the end, he becomes something else: an altruistic freedom-fighter who gives up the woman he loves to help save the world from tyranny. He goes through a change of almost 180 degrees in the span of two hours, one of the greatest transformations in movie history, and all because Rick needed to learn the lesson of forgiveness.

Humphrey Bogart as Rick Blaine in Casablanca (1942).

Another famous character is Ebenezer Scrooge from A Christmas Carol. A mean, miserly tyrant Scrooge makes his employees’ lives miserable. He famously says, “Bah, It’s humbug still! I won’t believe it.” He has no charitable Christmas spirit. He causes misery to all in his orbit. But at the end of the story, he is transformed into a kind, generous man because he learns the lesson of repentance, something he never would have dreamed of at the beginning of the story.

Ebenezer Scrooge, the anti-heroic protagonist of A Christmas Carol makes an epic journey from miser to hero. 

Another great fictional character is Elizabeth Bennet in Pride and Prejudice, who starts out full of prejudice regarding the upper echelons of the landed gentry, especially Fitzwilliam Darcy, who’s almost her nemesis at the beginning. But her attitude undergoes a profound shift when she sees how Darcy (whom she secretly likes but outwardly loathes) altruistically saves her family from ruin due to the generosity of his spirit. Elizabeth learns the value of trust.

Keira Knightly as Elizabeth Bennet in Pride and Prejudice (2005).

Another great example is Dustin Hoffman's character of Michael Dorsey in the movie Tootsie (1982). In the beginning, he's a womanizing actor who just wants to date numerous women, but in the end he puts on a dress to get a profitable role and ends up learning the value of respect.

Dustin Hoffman stars as an actor in need of an attitude adjustment in Tootsie (1982).

There are thousands and thousands of such transformations because that is the secret of great fiction: people who learn valuable life lessons while pursuing external goals of something they think they need, when in truth, they need something far more meaningful and earth-shattering.

If I had started my novel with Emma working in the orphanage, learning what it means to live a committed life, there would be no story. She would have achieved her goal by the third or fourth page. To make the story worth reading, she had to go out in the world and face dangerous men, taking on extraordinary challenges to learn that lesson. She needed to learn commitment in the trenches, so to speak. Because most of us learn these lessons after going out in the world in search of something else. We come to the truth after years of experiment and failure, often stumbling upon it when we least expect it.

And, most readers want to read about someone who is like them, someone who has to learn the hard way, someone who fails, but still succeeds in the end. Because it’s not enjoyable to read about someone who “gets it” right away and automatically does the right thing. Where’s the story? Where’s the challenge? We gain vicarious pleasure from reading about the struggles of another person, watching them overcome each adversity on their road to self-actualization (or sometimes ruination). Perhaps we think we’re smarter than these fictional people, but…well, we all have a lot to learn!

You can read about Emma's stunning transformation in The Unlikely Spy. Click here.

Reviewing An Old Classic: Dark Eyes

Dark Eyes is a 1987 film starring Marcello Mastroianni as Romano Patroni, an Italian man who marries a wealthy woman, yet falls in love with a Russian woman.

Marcello Mastroianni and Yelena Safonova in a scene from Dark Eyes.

A trained architect from a poor family, Romano lives the life of the idle rich. Even his wife, a wealthy heiress, mocks his architectural drawings and long-dead ambitions. They have settled into comfortable late middle-age, with a married daughter and grandchildren. But Romano's restlessness and feelings of inferiority and purposelessness lead him to a health spa where he meets a Russian woman in similar circumstances (unhappy marriage), who manages to capture his heart. But these feelings of incipient love disturb the lady, who flees back to Russia, but not before leaving Romano a note saying their love is impossible, and will only lead to heartbreak.

Not to be deterred, Romano concocts a plan to visit the woman in Russia, to see if it was just a passing infatuation or true love that requires deeper commitment. The journey is difficult in turn of the century Russia, but Romano manages to meet his lady love in her town and their mutual feelings are confirmed and renewed. Romano promises to return for her, a hope on which she pins all her happiness.

Dark Eyes is in the same genre as Forrest Gump or Candide, the story of an innocent person whose innocence is his strength and whose gentle manner makes him likely to be ignored--by all but a jealous "insider" who knows him too well. Usually the innocent hero in these stories undergoes a transformation, but in the case of Romano, he fails this crucial test. His wife is the jealous insider who knows his weaknesses too well, and exploits them to her advantage.

When this movie came out in the 1980's I was young (20s) and went to see it numerous times. I was captivated by the story, especially the metamorphosis of Romano as played by Marcello Mastroianni, an actor I had come to admire. But I didn't understand the ending, I didn't understand the passion between the two lovers, and I didn't understand what went wrong. Now that I am much older and hopefully a little wiser, I think the meaning of Chekhov's story is that there is a great danger in not living one's truth. That when a person participates in a lie, he becomes corrupted and distorted by the lie. He can't continue to live in the lie because to do so means he will lose all respect for himself as he watches himself become corrupted by falsehood and deception. No matter how difficult the truth, one must summon the bravery to live it, to not deny it, and to avoid the comfort of easy lies. Even if it hurts people, they will heal. Life will go on. But there is no hell like the hell of living a lie. The movie is a morality tale about living one's truth. It is a warning to anyone who thinks that participating in a lie will not cause them harm. Yes it will. Denial of the truth means being complicit in the lie. And a lifetime of lies becomes a very heavy burden to carry. At the end, Romano learns the awful truth, that self-deception is the worst deception of all. 

Marcello Mastroianni learns the burden of living a lie in Dark Eyes.