The Q are one of my favorite Star Trek civilizations—specifically, as they're presented in Voyager. Don't get me wrong, I love the Q episodes in Next Generation and DS9, too, but in my opinion Voyager is where they get really interesting. For any non-Trekkies out there, the Q are god-like extra-dimensional beings capable of altering reality on a whim. They are immortal and have seemingly complete control over time and space. Despite this extensive power, they take an interest in humans during Picard's term at the helm of the Enterprise—or one Q in particular, played by John de Lancie, who pops up now and then to pester his pet humans. We learn a bit about the culture of the Q Continuum in the course of these interactions, but the focus mostly stays on the impact Q's actions have on the Enterprise, and is less about the Q themselves.
In Voyager, we learn more about why an all-powerful being like the Q would take an interest in puny humans in the first place. In the episode “Death Wish”, a renegade Q comes to Captain Janeway seeking asylum. He wants to leave the Continuum and become human so that he can die. Being immortal, he feels, has made the Q go stagnant. The viewer gets a tour of the Continuum rendered in a format our inferior human minds can understand: a highway through the desert, next to which stands a run-down house where bored-looking people are lounging around, some reading, some playing games. No one is talking; the Q seeking asylum explains that they've run out of things to talk about. Everything has already been said, and all the Q have already seen all there is to see in the universe. The Q feels his life has become futile. He finds it intolerable to keep on living, but he can't stop.
This episode is, for me, one of the best depictions of immortal beings in fiction because of how it recognizes the full implications of immortality. I've seen or read other stories that do this well, too, like the movie “He Never Died” or the novel The Minotaur Takes a Cigarette Break. In both of those, the protagonist is a mythological figure that has persisted into the present day, and living for thousands of years has taken its toll. Their brains are wired for a different time; they find themselves out of sync with modern society, living at its fringes. Both characters live alone and rarely socialize. Theirs isn't the opulent immortality of the Greek gods or the elegant long lives of Tolkien's elves.
Granted, none of us really know what it would be like to be immortal, so I suppose it's not entirely fair to criticize any depiction of immortality as inauthentic. Maybe the better critique is to say this isn't the most interesting way a writer can treat it. If you have a character who's lived for hundreds or thousands of years, you're missing an opportunity to give them a worldview that's very different from the average reader's.
My current work in progress involves a lot of very long-lived characters, so the question of how to capture this kind of extensive lifespan on the page has been front and center in my mind of late. These are some of the main things I’ve been thinking about as I’ve been working to build these characters in a way that will read as real and interesting on the page.
1) They have a different relationship with time.
Mortality gives any life an inherent sense of urgency. Time becomes a limited resource that can't be wasted. But the more time a being expects to have, the less true that will be. And if time isn't quite as precious, that will have a few likely impacts on their behavior. They're likely to be more patient, less reckless, and more thoughtful before they act. Think of long-lived cultures from fiction, like the Ents in Lord of the Rings or the Ogier in Wheel of Time.
Long-lived characters are also likely to take more of a long-view. The math of short-term gains versus long-term consequences balances out differently for someone who's still going to be around in a few centuries. Immortal characters can absolutely still do things that are self-serving, but they're much less likely to make decisions that would sacrifice the long-term stability or health of their environment. After all, they're going to need to keep living here for a very, very long time.
For characters like vampires, that start out mortal then gain immortality later on, their relationship to time is likely to shift the longer they're alive. A vampire that was just turned 20 years ago might still have that inherent urgency of a human, but if your character has been around since ancient Egypt, their outlook is likely to fall more on the Ent side of the spectrum. This can be useful if you have a cast of immortals with a broad age range, helping you to give them traits that differentiate each other.
2) They've experienced a lot of loss.
This is especially true for any immortal beings that live among mortals. Any mortal that they form a friendship—or more—with, they do so knowing that they're going to lose them. And this isn't just true of relationships. They've likely seen landmarks crumble and civlizations topple. The town where they were born might no longer exist, or maybe now it goes by a different name; depending on how long it's been, their culture of birth could have been completely forgotten.
Some of this is likely to be true even if your characters live in a society where everyone is very long-lived. Loss doesn't always need to mean death, for one thing. Even in a world where everybody is immortal, the relationships between those individuals can shift over time just like they do for people. A certain number of tragedies are going to accrue in the course of a long life, however charmed. Think of the narratives around the various Greek gods. Yes, they are immortal and powerful, but they still experience grief, betrayal, and heartbreak.
This is naturally going to influence how an immortal character interacts with their world. They may be less willing to form friendships with mortals, for example, to spare themselves the inevitable pain of losing another person they've grown close to. Or maybe they've developed a thick shell in general as a defense mechanism, or are particularly skeptical or pessimistic in their outlook. They might also become less inclined to take risks, an effect that can stack with their shifted relationship to time mentioned above to make them very cautious characters that are difficult to put into motion toward a goal.
3) They're from a different time—but they're not necessarily stuck there.
People in general develop a lot of their habits, preferences, tastes, and other core aspects of their worldview and identity during their formative years. For a character that's hundreds or thousands of years old, that formative period happened during a very different time setting than the present of your story. Whatever world your story is set in, it's very likely that a lot of things have changed in the interrim. Think about how many cultural changes someone who was born in 1800 would've seen between their childhood and the present, and that's just a couple hundred years ago. Music, fashion, food, transportation, communication—just about every aspect of the character's everyday life will have changed, likely many times over, in the course of their life.
Different immortal characters are going to deal with this in different ways, of course. But, for most, there are going to be some ways they've adapted, and some old-fashioned habits or tastes that are going to stick around as core tenets of their identity even through all the changes around them. Part of this comes down to practicality. If your character lives intermingled with a broader society, they'd want to keep up with the times enough to live their life, which probably means updating their wardrobe every few decades and staying on top of technological developments. But they might not bother staying with the times in other aspects of the culture—maybe they still listen to the same music that they've used to relax for hundreds of years, for instance, and don't bother listening to any of that new-fangled stuff.
Now, if you're writing about a society of long-lived beings that are cut off from other cultures, then that culture is likely to stay more consistent and evolve less over time. In this case, their old-fashioned-ness would likely be more immediately visible once they're brought out of that isolation. I mentioned the Ogier from the Wheel of Time before, and they're a good example here, too. They live in self-contained communities and have rarely engaged with humans for decades, when the story starts. Because of that, they still hold to old traditions that other, faster-moving cultures have abandoned, and a lot of their dress and speech seems old-fashioned to the people who interact with them.
4) They've kept themselves alive this long for a reason.
This is less of a factor if you're writing about characters that are both immortal and invulnerable. If it's a being that can't die—like, say, someone that's been cursed to live forever—then there's still a reason that they're still alive, it just doesn't have a whole lot to do with their behavior.
In most cases, though, you're going to be writing about characters that can die, even if not from natural causes. This is true even of gods in many mythological traditions, and most long-lived fictional creatures can be killed in the right conditions, even if it's not quite as easy as it is for we delicate mortals. Because of this, a certain amount of self-selection happens in their populations. Just because an individual is given the option of immortality doesn't mean that they're going to make the right choices to hang on to it. Individuals inclined to make dangerous enemies, seek out violence, or put themselves in very risky situations are, statistically, less likely to be the ones who are still alive to celebrate their 900th birthday.
There's a second point to this, too: the character has something that they're continuing to live for. This is the antidote to the kind of existential boredom that is at the heart of that Q storyline I mentioned earlier. Just because a character can live forever doesn't mean they'll always want to. That takes some kind of driving purpose that keeps them pushing through all of the losses they've accumulated, and all of the changes they've had to adapt to.
5) Eternal life doesn't guarantee an infinite memory capacity.
This is another point where the type of being you're dealing with is going to make a difference. If your immortal beings are Data-style androids, then it is feasible they could maintain an exact record of memories stretching back across hundreds of years—it's just a question of storage capacity, at that point. But for most characters, memories are naturally going to fade with time. Exactly how much of their very long past they can recall with any detail is something that it's smart to figure out from the start when you're working with an immortal character.
Granted, these characters are superhuman by default. Even so, think about your own memories. More recent ones are likely to be the most complete and vivid on average. The ones that you hang on to the strongest from earlier in your life are probably major moments connected to strong emotions. So maybe you have a lot of great memories of your favorite family vacation when you were five, but just have a few spotty memories of first grade. The everyday stuff tends to fade away pretty quickly, and once you get a few decades away from the memory, only the most intense ones are likely to stick around.
I think this is one of those places where writing a long-lived character that feels real means finding the right balance. On the one hand, it's likely they would have a wide variety of experiences and accrue a lot of skills and knowledge. But unless they're a machine, or an actual god, then they still need to practice skills to keep them, and knowledge can fade over time if it's not accessed. So if you want to have a character read Egyptian hieroglyphics, it's helpful to show the reader that they still use the language, at least occasionally—it's going to strain some readers' suspension of disbelief if the character hasn't seen hieroglyphics for 2,000 years but can still read them fluently.
I think if there's one connecting thread to all of these points, it's that a long-lived character still needs to feel fully developed and consistent. Immortality isn't just a superpower. It's the kind of character trait that's likely to dramatically influence the character's entire identity and worldview in ways that go much deeper than how hard they are to kill in a fight. And it's also not only a good thing. There are potential downsides that would come along with a very long life, and those are things you can use to add more complexity and depth to a character that might otherwise end up being too perfect or powerful.
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