Great stories live not in the characters themselves, but in the relationships – the charged, shifting dynamics that bind or break them.
I had something of an epiphany the other week about the nature of fiction.
Turns out I’m in illustrious company. Sir Kazuo Ishiguro had exactly the same thought a few years back and unveiled it in his Nobel Prize lecture which I stumbled upon by chance.
He says,
It’s not the character that lingers – it’s the chemistry.
We use the “favourite character” trope as a shorthand for “favourite relationship”.
Characters are what we name when we talk about stories we love. “I loved Atticus Finch,” or “Tony Soprano is unforgettable.” “Lizzie Bennett is perfect.” But what we’re often responding to isn’t the character in isolation – it’s the character in relation. The bond. The fracture. The space in between.
Characters that don’t connect
Kazuo Ishiguro put it better in his Nobel Lecture in 2017:
“The reason why so many vivid, undeniably convincing characters in novels, films and plays so often failed to touch me was because these characters didn’t connect to any of the other characters in an interesting human relationship.”
(I’ve put the full section of his speech below because it’s worth studying.)
This was a turning point in his creative thinking.
In my view, he wasn’t suggesting that relationships are a brutish tool to reveal deeper character, as though peeling back a psychological layer. They are the point.
He was suggesting something far more interesting: that relationships are not secondary, but central. Not a tool – but an additional presence. A relationship can become a character in itself. It can carry emotional weight, create narrative momentum, and generate joy, sorrow, humour, or dread entirely on its own terms.
The catalyst of enjoyment
The enjoyment we draw from Lizzie Bennet and Mr Darcy isn’t just two difficult people sparring, but two different people creating something greater than the sum of their parts.
This is because we, as humans, are drawn not just to people but to interactions. We are wired for social observation. We don’t just want to know who someone is – we want to watch what happens when they meet someone else. What sparks? What fails? What deepens, and what derails?
It’s in that space between characters – the invisible, shifting field – that stories truly come alive. That’s where the laughter lives. The heartbreak. The delight. That’s where we feel something.
Think of Jack Nicholson’s famous “You can’t handle the truth” speech in A Few Good Men. A virtuoso monologue. But his character was only pushed there because of his prickly relationship with smug, upstart Lt Daniel Kaffee (Tom Cruise). Col Nathan Jessup wouldn’t go there for anyone else.
Relationships keep characters animated
Or think of Frodo and Sam. Fleabag and the Hot Priest. Or even enemies: Hannibal and Will Graham, Salieri and Mozart. These aren’t just people. The relationships are the story. They evolve, intensify, falter, reform. They are alive. They are a separate element, a gestalt.
Even in stories about solitude, it’s the ghost of a relationship – or its absence – that haunts us. The lover left. The friend not forgiven. The connection that never was.
A great relationship on the page or screen is not just an emotional anchor – it’s a living dynamic that commands our attention. It doesn’t merely show us who the characters are. It creates something new – something we recognise, even if we’ve never lived it ourselves.
That is where the enjoyment can be found.
Great characters = great relationships
So perhaps we’ve been asking the wrong question when we praise stories for their “great characters.” Maybe the better question is: what are the relationships like? Are they alive? Do they move? Do they become something more than their parts?
Because that’s where the joy is. That’s what we remember. Not the portrait, but the dance.
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What if, as Ishiguro suggests, we stopped fussing over whether our characters are “three-dimensional,” and instead asked: Are their relationships surprising? Are they emotionally charged? Do they move, evolve, sting, or resonate?
And maybe, just maybe, if we attend to that space more closely, as Ishiguro says, our characters will take care of themselves.
Excerpt from Kazuo Ishiguro Nobel speech
“The reason why so many vivid, undeniably convincing characters in novels, films and plays so often failed to touch me was because these characters didn’t connect to any of the other characters in an interesting human relationship. And immediately, this next thought came regarding my own work: What if I stopped worrying about my characters and worried instead about my relationships?
“I thought about E.M. Forster’s famous distinction between three-dimensional and two-dimensional characters. A character in a story became three-dimensional, he’d said, by virtue of the fact that they “surprised us convincingly”.
“It was in so doing they became “rounded”. But what, I now wondered, if a character was three-dimensional, while all his or her relationships were not? Elsewhere in that same lecture series, Forster had used a humorous image, of extracting the storyline out of a novel with a pair of forceps and holding it up, like a wriggling worm, for examination under the light.
‘Does it have emotional resonance?’
“Couldn’t I perform a similar exercise and hold up to the light the various relationships that criss-cross any story? Could I do this with my own work – to stories I’d completed and ones I was planning? I could look at, say, this mentor-pupil relationship. Does it say something insightful and fresh?
“Or now that I was staring at it, does it become obvious it’s a tired stereotype, identical to those found in hundreds of mediocre stories? Or this relationship between two competitive friends: is it dynamic? Does it have emotional resonance? Does it evolve? Does it surprise convincingly? Is it three-dimensional? I suddenly felt I understood better why in the past various aspects of my work had failed, despite my applying desperate remedies.
“The thought came to me that all good stories, never mind how radical or traditional their mode of telling, had to contain relationships that are important to us; that move us, amuse us, anger us, surprise us.
Perhaps in future, if I attended more to my relationships, my characters would take care of themselves.”