Writing Unforgettable Characters: What Miss Jean Brodie Teaches Student Writers
A character readers can't ignore is not the one with the most description; it is the one whose behavior bends every scene around her. Writing unforgettable characters, as Muriel Spark's Miss Jean Brodie proves, depends on commanding entrances, mixed traits, and other characters' reactions rather than period detail. A Guardian review of the Royal Lyceum's revival describes Gayle Rankin's Brodie telling a music teacher to 'proceed as if I wasn't here' — and nothing does. Stripped of 1930s starchiness and staged in a bohemian register, she stays impossible to ignore, which is exactly the test your competition entries must pass.
Let the Entrance Disrupt the Scene
The review's best teaching moment costs nothing to borrow. Brodie walks into the classroom of Mr Lowther, played by Brian Ferguson, and tells the music teacher she will not be a distraction: 'Proceed as if I wasn't here.' The scene, of course, cannot proceed, and that gap between her words and the room's reality is the whole trick. A commanding entrance is not loudness, costume, or a long physical inventory; it is a promise of disruption that the scene immediately keeps. Notice too how the review's physical details serve behavior rather than replace it — Rankin floats across Chloe Lamford's dust-pink set like an 'exotic moth: colourful, distractable, ever present.' Every description earns its place by predicting how she will act.
Our exercise: the false-reassurance entrance. Open a scene with your character announcing, in effect, that nothing will change — 'I'll only be a minute,' 'Don't mind me,' 'I won't be a distraction' — and then break that promise before the page ends. Three rules apply. First, at least one other character must visibly abandon what they were doing. Second, your character cannot shout; the disruption should come from certainty, not volume. Third, limit yourself to one physical detail, and choose one that predicts action, the way a drape-sleeved top and leather skirt signal a Brodie who moves rather than poses. Then dig out an old draft and rewrite its flat opening scene using the same three rules, and compare how the room reacts.
Build Contradiction Into the Core
The review's adjectives refuse to settle into one note: Rankin's Brodie is funny, sharp-tongued and sexually forthright, then colourful, distractable, ever present. That mixture is why she dominates. A character built from a single trait — the strict teacher, the quirky friend, the brooding hero — reads like a label, and labels are easy to skim past. Unforgettable figures hold two qualities that argue with each other: magnetic and ridiculous, generous and self-serving, disciplined and chaotic. Spark's heroine has survived decades of reimagining partly because no single adjective could contain her, and Vicky Featherstone's production leans into that by letting her be comic and unsettling in the same breath. When your traits contradict, readers keep watching to see which one wins.
Our exercise: the arguing pair. List five single-word traits for your protagonist, then force each one into a pair with its opposite or near-opposite — vain and generous, timid and ruthless, devout and scheming. Choose the pair that makes you slightly uncomfortable, because discomfort means tension, and write a two-hundred-word scene where both traits act on the same decision. The character must not resolve the contradiction; she should act from both sides of it at once, the way Brodie can charm a room and bend it to her will in the same gesture. Keep the pair on a sticky note above your desk, and check every major scene against it before you revise.
Let Other Characters Prove Her Power
The review's sharpest line is not about Brodie at all: 'Nothing can proceed as if Jean Brodie was not there.' Power in fiction is measured by other people's behavior, and a scene-dominating character is built as much from the reactions around her as from her own lines. If your protagonist walks into a room and nobody adjusts, readers learn she is optional. The review shows a whole production reorganizing itself — set, staging, tempo — around one figure, and your scenes should work the same way. Give secondary characters small, telling responses: a pause before answering, a joke abandoned halfway, a plan quietly rewritten. Reactions are evidence, and evidence convinces readers far faster than any paragraph insisting that your heroine is remarkable.
Our exercise: the reaction audit. Take a scene where your central character appears and highlight every sentence she speaks or acts in; leave everything else untouched. Now count what the other characters do in response. If their behavior would be identical with her deleted, the scene has failed the test, so rewrite their responses — interruptions, accommodations, small acts of resistance — until the scene visibly orbits her. For a harder version, write the same scene from a minor character's point of view and describe only what Brodie-style figure does to their plans. If that minor character cannot stop thinking about her, your presence is working; if they shrug and move on, you have more revision to do.
Run the Impossible-to-Ignore Test
The revival is proof by stress test. Featherstone's production ditches 1930s starchiness for the bohemian avant garde, yet the review calls Spark's heroine extraordinary made more extraordinary still — because her power lives in behavior, not in period furniture. That is the standard for your own drafts: strip away the setting-specific details, the era markers, the atmospheric trimmings, and ask what remains. If your character would evaporate in a different decade or a different country, she was never the engine of the story; the scenery was. Strong presence travels. Before you submit anything anywhere, transplant your character mentally into a plain white room with nothing but one other person, and see whether she still commands it.
This matters for competition entries especially. If you are preparing work for something like the Cosmopolitan Writing Award, which accepts rolling entries with free submission and private AI feedback, run the transplant test on your opening pages first, since judges meet your character before your world. Remember that any AI assistance must be disclosed and the submission must primarily reflect your own creative contribution. Our final exercise: the era swap. Rewrite one key scene from your draft in a completely different period and place, keeping only your character's dialogue patterns, contradictions, and effect on others. Whatever survives the swap is your character's actual presence; whatever dies was decoration. Build the next draft from the survivors.