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| Character Development: The Fundamentals; Writing Guide Chapter 2 | |
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| Tweet Topic Started: Feb 10 2009, 02:06 PM (231 Views) | |
| Xantar | Feb 10 2009, 02:06 PM Post #1 |
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Not Jeff Probst
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So you've conceived your main character. You've given her a detailed back history, and you've come up with a development arc for her to go through in the course of the story. You've made sure she isn't a Mary Sue. And now you want to take it to the next level and make her compelling so that the reader cares what happens to her. Where do you go from here? The answers are as varied as the stories you will write, but I have a few fundamental observations to offer. For convenience, I'm going to write this segment using female pronouns for your character, but everything I say here will apply equally to male characters. The most important thing above all is to generate empathy for your character. Note that I didn't say "sympathy." Sympathy and empathy are different things. Sympathy is when your reader feels favorably towards your character and what she is doing. Depending on your intentions with the character, sympathy may be a good thing, but it's not absolutely necessary. For your character to work, though, your reader must feel empathy for her, and that's a trickier thing. Empathy is when your reader recognizes a fundamental common humanity with your character. It doesn't mean your reader has to like the character or feel favorably disposed towards her. In fact, that may be the opposite of what you want. But it is essential for your reader to feel that your character is a recognizable human being that one might meet at some point in life. How do we do this? Well, to generate a recognizable and fundamental humanity in a character, you would have to first answer the philosophical question of what makes us human. My personal approach is to start with two questions and then work from there: 1. What does your character want the most? 2. What does your character fear the most? When I say this, I'm not looking for answers like, "My character wants a birthday cake and she fears spiders." I'm looking for something more basic than that. Something even more basic than, "My character wants to protect her best friend." Even loyalty to your friends is something that will end eventually (although it might require the death of your friend). No, I'm looking for something deeper and more essential to the makeup of the character. I'm looking for a desire in the character that's so deep that it ultimately guides everything she does even if she won't admit it. I'm looking for a fear that's so fundamental and primal that the merest hint of it would paralyze her with almost unreasoning terror. The simplest example would be a character who has been abused as a child. What does she want the most? To be loved. Not just loved but loved unconditionally, fully and hotly forever and ever. What does she fear? Most likely, she would fear being abandoned and rejected above all else. That's all pretty simple, but the trick is in figuring out all the implications which can grow very profound and complex indeed. Let's look at what our character wants again. The truth is what she wants is ultimately unattainable. It is impossible for someone to sustain an emotional connection of such intensity for so long while still remaining functional in society. Our character, in other words, is chasing after a dream that she will never actually get, but unless she admits that to herself, she will always keep trying to find that perfect, everlasting love and ultimately wasting a lot of time and energy. What about her fears? The thing about fear is the idea of the thing is much worse than the actual thing itself. If our character is deathly afraid of being abandoned, she ruled by that condition all her life even if nobody ever actually abandons her. She could fly to pieces at the slightest hint that her lover is withdrawing slightly, even if it’s only because at that particular time he is deeply engrossed in a developing storyline in his favorite TV show and spends an inordinate amount of time talking about it on forums and chat rooms. Actual abandonment isn’t having an effect on her because it’s not happening. But the idea of it is. This is the fundamental state of the human condition. We want a many things for ourselves, but we will never get them all. We are terrified of many things, but the truth is we will probably never have to face most of them (if any). Life is the process of working out compromises with your basic impulses and coming to terms with the idea that you will not get everything you want and you also have to live with the possibility of your worst nightmare coming true. All of the preceding discussion is to give you this basic rule of character development: if you want your character to be believable and compelling, she must be driven by a few basic impulses and every action must be consistent with them. That is, you should be asking yourself at every turn, “Given what we know about my character’s motivations, would she really take this action in a particular situation?” It’s easy to see how a consistent character like this can hold the interest of your reader: we all understand how this stuff works and so we empathize with the character. But to show you how empathy is different from sympathy and why the former is more important than the latter, let’s take a look at a villain: Hannibal Lecter. He is surely no hero, and by any definition of the word, he is not a good man. However, his basic character contains a fundamental desire that we can relate to. Hannibal is an extremely intelligent man, and he would like above all else to be recognized for it. The movies demonstrate that Hannibal can put up with being imprisoned and subjected to all kinds of indignities, but he hates to have his intelligence ignored or insulted. Particularly in Silence of the Lambs, he reacts very poorly when Clarice doesn’t go along with his mind games, and in Red Dragon, he kills a musician whom he considers talentless. It’s hard to know what Hannibal fears (if anything), but for a character who is supposed to be an icon rather than a totally realistic depiction, that’s all right. The point here is that Hannibal Lecter has a recognizable human motivation driving him along, and it’s one that we can all understand to a degree. We all want people to recognize our intelligence and treat us with respect. We wouldn’t go to the extremes of literally killing people we view as possessing inferior intelligence and eating them, but on some level, we understand the impulse. That’s what makes Lecter such a fascinating and compelling villain. He doesn’t just do evil deeds for their own sake. He has a reason for them, and we can understand that reason. We can even see a little bit of him in ourselves to a lesser degree. Who hasn’t fantasized at one point or another about inflicting brutal pain upon someone who has insulted our intelligence? The thing about Hannibal is he pretty much has only one driving motivation in his life, and he will do anything to achieve it. After all, he does not fear death or being ostracized by society. Nor does he particularly want to be seen as a good person. What makes him such an extreme character is he is free to pursue his goals unhindered by anything else, and in that sense he is completely true and consistent to his character. That’s what makes him a sociopath. Our hypothetical abused character earlier on is the same way. She only has two basic impulses guiding her through the world, and without anything else to temper her personality, she will go to extreme actions at the drop of a hat in order to protect what she wants most of all in life. So here’s another basic rule of character development: extreme personalities are those who have only one significant desire and single-mindedly pursue it to the exclusion of everything else. More down to earth and realistically human characters have more than one basic driving motivation behind their actions. And here’s where things get really complicated (and sometimes fun). We may have more than one basic, fundamental desire in life. And the chances are at some point those desires will compete. That is the basis of drama. Consider the character of Marcus Brutus, the close friend of Julius Caesar who betrays him. You could break Brutus down to a couple different desires and fears: he desires to have the unquestioning trust and loyalty of another. He desires to be seen by all as an upstanding citizen who upholds the rule of law. He fears being seen as someone who stood idly by and did nothing to stop the destruction of the Roman Republic. And he fears being known as a traitor. For most of his association with Caesar, all of these forces driving Brutus were basically consistent. Caesar was serving the interests of the Republic (as Brutus saw it), so there was no conflict between his need to be a loyal and trusted friend and his need to be known as a man of principle. But when Caesar threatened to do away with the republican system of government altogether, Brutus was thrown into turmoil. He can’t satisfy all his desires, and he must open himself to at least one of his great fears. The process of working out these competing forces in his personality are what drives Brutus’ character arc throughout the story. Note also that people are capable of changing the fundamental driving forces of their character. It’s very hard, but it’s doable. A greedy person who used to want to have more money and possessions than anybody else in the world can change to become someone who wants to feel as useful and loved as possible and does as much to help other people as she can. Which leads to our last basic rule of character development: the interplay and conflict between fundamental motivations in a character or between multiple characters is the basis of a dramatic story. The resolution of competing character motivations is what makes up a character arc. Character growth is when some motivations are substituted with others. You must know what your character’s motivations are at all times and how they will play out over the course of your story. So now we have created our character and rounded her out. How do we change her throughout the course of the story? I will talk about that a little later. Edited by Xantar, Mar 13 2009, 09:13 AM.
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PureVideoGames — Made From Only the Finest Ingredients Launched September 12, 2004 Xantarcube: Dragon, I need you to render a thief. She should be a 15-year old girl with ninja-like abilities and a knife. Try to give her a badass pose, too. Dragon of DTT: Ok. How's this? http://www.purevideogames.net/images/Character_Art/thief_full.jpg Mortal Kombat: Dragon. Wins. L33tality! Dragon of DTT: Don't complain. Buy a hooker. Xantarcube: What am I going to do with a hooker? Dragon of DTT: Wii Sports. Shadyshark: but adrienne may be pregnant Shadyshark: or have cancer Shadyshark: she's hoping for cancer Seriously. Even I'm in my signature. Fix yours. | |
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| Makokam | Feb 11 2009, 11:31 AM Post #2 |
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Apostate
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I actually saw alot of that in some of my characters, and...well, not much in others. For example, Jonathan Rose wants to have, for lack of a better term, a normal life. However he's accepted the fact that he can't, and it's made him a bit bitter. But when he finds someone that allows him to have at least something that resembles normalcy, he goes out of his way, and perhaps beyond reason to protect it. (I was thinking of posting a sort of story with that character just to put up something, but now I think I will so I can show what I was just talking about.) And characters like Makor Corano don't really have any non-superfical motavation, or fears, at all. Wolfric Zanzibar has a very obvious and yet vague motivation, in that his greatest desire, at least as far as he wants to think, is to kill the dragon the destroyed his hometown. |
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THIS is my side, THIS is the demiltarized zone, and THAT is your side. "Good and Evil" is too complicated. I prefer, "Us and Them". ![]() Xantarcube: *Throws Makokam down on the bed* Dalmar: Dalmar runs from no man! ... Bees, on the other hand... ![]() Join the Dark Side If you ever wonder what to do in life, ask What Would Jack Bauer Do, because what Jack Bauer would do sure as hell will get things done faster than what Jesus would do. | |
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