None of us are the same person all the time. We change according to the people we are around; they draw different aspects of us out of ourselves. A sibling may draw us into the role of younger or older sibling automatically. A guy talking with other guys may talk and act one way and, on seeing a pretty girl, turn around and talk and act completely differently. Have you ever said or felt that a certain person brings out the best or worst in you? It’s probably true. You do it to others as well.

What’s true in life should be true in our writing. One of the major purposes of supporting characters, major or minor, good or bad, is to draw out aspects of the protagonist. There are differences between who we think we are and who we actually are and it’s other people and/or difficult situations that draw these out and reveal them to ourselves or to the readers of our stories.

Nothing reveals a character more than contradictions. The deeper the character, the more profound the contradictions. Let’s do an exercise. Take a sheet of paper and on one side in a vertical column write attributes or virtues that a character may have. For example, our character Jimmy Bill Bob is friendly, courteous, kind, obedient, cheerful, thrifty, brave, clean, and reverent. That’s right – a real Boy Scout. Now, draw a line down the center of the page and in a column opposite the first attributes, write their opposite. Be creative. You can’t use un – as in unkind or ir- as in irreverent. Find words that you feel mean the opposite of the word on the left hand side of the line. I’ll wait.

Done? Fine. Here’s the thing – if everything you’ve written on the left hand side of the line is true about the character, so will everything on the right hand side be true in some way to some degree. Not at the same moment, but it can flip from one to the other in a nanosecond. It doesn’t have to be a total change which would be kind of psychotic but it can and does happen just that fast. You’ve seen it in others and I’m sure you can see it in yourself, in your actions.

It also comes down to how you define each term. In what way is a given character courteous; in what way are they rude? An act of bravery can be a small thing as well as a big thing. If this is true in real life – and I submit that it is – then it should be true in the characters that we write.

I also want to pass on something I gleaned from a terrific book on acting called Audition by Michael Shurtleff. He noted that actors loved to do “transitions” from one moment to the next, from one emotion to the next. Fates know that I was guilty of that in my acting days. He proclaimed that transitions were the death of good acting. We didn’t do it in real life; we just went from one emotion to the next often showing them hard against one another, in great contrast.

This is true in writing as well. Don’t explain the contradictions; state them and move on to the next moment. The reader will sort them out. Just make sure that the moments are true; that you’re not doing a contradiction as a short hand for a character. They are meant to reveal things about the character. A gimmick is a gimmick and makes for bad writing. Let contradictions reveal the character to you and then you can show them to your reader.  The reader will be stunned and then nod in agreement because you’ve explored something that, deep down, they know – that people, and life, are a nice messy ball of contradictions.

That makes it true.

MONDAY MORNING: Mindy Newell

TUESDAY MORNING: Emily S. Whitten

This Monday, REVOLUTION returns to NBC to complete its freshman season. Four months off the air has given Executive Producer Eric Kripke the chance to move the story forward and gives us a lot of answers to the show’s mysteries. Eric, and series star Elizabeth Mitchell, give us a look at what we need to jump back into there series. Meanwhile, DC’s editorial department is shows some turmoil and Neil Gaiman (along with his character ANGELA) are headed to Marvel.

Take us ANYWHERE! The Point Radio App is now in the iTunes App store – and it’s FREE! Just search under “pop culture The Point”. The Point Radio  – 24 hours a day of pop culture fun for FREE. GO HERE and LISTEN FREE on any computer or on any other  mobile device with the Tune In Radio app – and follow us on Twitter @ThePointRadio.

The Lady Lazarus saga’s final chapter for the tale that is, of the three, the most human: Rebel Angels (Tor Books, Hardcover, $26.99, March, 2013). It’s October, 1939 and our heroine Magda is saying goodbye to her little sister Gisele, sending her off with spymaster Knox to be protected by Churchill in the UK whilst Magda and her fallen angel-man Raziel sallie forth to Baku, Afghanistan to find a way to bring down the Asmodel-possessed Hitler and prevent the wholesale slaughter of millions that Gisele has foreseen. To do this, Magda seeks the primordial magic even more potent than the Book of Raziel, the Lazarus women’s legacy—the Heaven Sapphire. And the last time it was used, all Hell broke loose. The gem is its own creature, not to be summoned by mere words, not even by a Lazarus, the ancient line of witches who can come back from the dead via a deal with the Witch of Ein Dor of the Bible. Everyone is after it and she has to get there first, no matter the cost. And so she has to announce to Vampire Count Gabor Bathory that she is quitting his employ and leaving Budapest once again to try to stop this war—and get his blessing on her clandestine marriage to the man who’d given up Heaven to be with her.  What does Bathory do?  The only thing a Vampire Count can do for the closest thing he has to a daughter in the face of war—he allows her to escape by throwing the most lavish vampire party ever and invites all magicals, under a truce, to celebrate with him! Even her beloved Eva, now in deep-cover as the SS Werewolf leader Szalasi’s paramour, attends. All the players are on stage for the grand finale in contexts at once perplexing, astonishing, and satisfying.

And that’s what makes this work, even when I can barely suspend disbelief – as with the literal flying carpets of the women of Helena. The human merchant Ziyad is just that in his air of passion in the real sense of the word—to suffer as a mensch, an Aristotelian man, and not merely a human animal. The over-arching emotions and dilemmas in this climax are elevated to what is best and worst in humans, so that infernal and divine are one and meet—as above, so below, the divine reaching down toward humanity and humanity reaching up toward the divine, by either good or evil means, by true hearts of compassion or bloated egos. And the means makes all the difference, so that evil might not triumph over the face of God’s creation, via the human spirit in all of them, even the once-divine. This concluding chapter is not so much an ethical book (that was more for book II), but a passionate one, one that faces despair head-on and says, like Gandalf to the Balrog, “You shall not pass!”

Lang’s prose here is her most calculated—book I is still the book of my heart. But she pulls off things here that made me doubt and yet made them somehow plausible. She’s honest enough that not all of your favourites will survive, but none will be forgotten, and thus stays true to the Jewish concept of yizkor that propels this story: remember so that none truly die forever. There are awww moments that remind you that Lang is also a romance writer, without sending you for the insulin shots.  She does not flinch from torturing her characters—see the dungeons of the Baku Institute where the mad scientist Prof. Roskonikoff conducts operations that resemble crude, early frontal lobotomies. This is not a book to be handed to young women without adult supervision. Finally, I will say that, in the end, somehow, a spark of love triumphs and there is, indeed, life out of death.  And you can’t help but love that and smile.

Lady Lazarus (Tor, trade Sept. 2010 $14.99, mass market June 2011 $7.99)

Dark Victory (Tor, March ’13, hardcover $25.99, Kindle $9.99)