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Creating characters
Creating characters is among the hardest things writers have to do. That´s why it´s so damn typical that you can´t get away from it. Every story you write has to have characters. But why is it so hard?
Well, all of us know how people are. And we can feel if a fictional character isn´t belivable, just as we notice a real person doing strange things. That´s the simple reason for why it´s so hard to dream up new characters. I just wish there were an equally simple solution.
But that´s the cause for all advice on how to create believable characters. You know, all the...
Create a backstory
... and all the other stuff that you hear about and read about. Those strategies are trying to solve how you create believable characters by nailing each and every character.
I don´t know about you, but I´ve tried several approaches to creating characters, and I´ve never really had any real use for pages and pages of backstory, and pictures never seem to start off my imagination. Well, perhaps that´s only me, because there certainly seem to be lots of writers that can create characters just fine.
But for us that cannot, what about us?
That´s when my brain can´t stop formulating ideas, and try to solve the problem. So let´s try to go through this together.
One thing that I have noticed is that every one of those theories are based on creating a single character at a time, but in real life we always get to know people by comparing them to others. "Johnny said this, which reminds me of Sarah. And he looks kind of like Benjamin. But that movement is straight from John Travolta. And he sounds more like that guy I met yesterday."
Therefore it makes more sense to create several characters simultaneously, and try to get them to interact in a believable way. One character can be perfect in one setting, and totally wrong in another setting. Believability, after all, depends on so many factors: genre, tone, story, setting, etc, that interaction seems to be the key.
If you buy that, then the next question is "how do you create believable interactions?" To answer that, we need to venture into the wonderful world of group psychology.
To make the characters co-exist, you must make sure that they influence each other. If one, or both, goes unchanged through all encounters, you know that they only exist beside one another.
So, how do you insure that your character co-exist?
Well, first you have to consider the complementary effect we have on each other.
The complementary effect can most easily be understood as the phenomenon where you and a friend are talking about something, say obesity, and your friend comments about world hunger. You say something about understanding the difficulties in trying to lose weight. Suddenly you find yourself defending overeating. Without meaning to, you have taken different sides on an issue that you probably have no definitive view on.
It doesn´t mean that you´re no longer friends, only that you´ve just experienced the complementary effect - you took opposite sides for a moment. Someone needed to stand up for obesity, and this time it was your turn. In reality you will probably take another stand next time, having bought some of the points brought up, and not wanting to argue needlessly.
In stories characters are more conservative. And this complementary effect is mostly used to create conflict between the protagonist and the antagonist, but also to create tension between the protagonist and the mentor, or between two protagonists.
And that really presents the answer to how you create a duo with different social masks - you place the characters side by side, and place them on the opposite sides of all kinds of features. Like this:
Deciding what factors are relevant is much easier than trying to write a whole backstory. Just fill in the characteristics, one by one, and soon you will have not just one, but two rounded characters. Now you can start to creating relevant backstories and motivations for them. Another thing you will have to put energy into to acchieve co-existence, is creating a good trap. A trap is a situation that guarantees that the characters you have created will co-exist. There are only a few different traps, but you can vary and combine them almost indefinitely:
It´s not enough to place your characters for example, in a friendship, though. Without a strong reason for (voluntarily) participating in the relationship, the characters will likely drift apart at the first sight of disagreement. Just look at yourself. Would you stay if some stranger started a conflict with you? Probably not. So, what´s keeping those characters together? An outside force, deep feelings of belonging, a particular need, or some event in the past? As soon as you know what started the trap, you also have something to test and threaten. This will shake the characters fundamentally. That´s pretty self-evident, isn´t it? But I´ve never seen how you write descriptions of a character´s different personas, or even a hint of how you keep a character consistent while changing persona. That´s why you need to do a different complementary chart for every relationship your protagonist has. After a few charts you will find that some features come back again and again, and that when you have found that person´s core persona. Use that core persona when you´re establishing his habits, his style, his language and other signifiers.
One way of doing it is "the enemy of my enemy is my friend", but then we lessen the potential conflict, instead of strengthen it. So how? Place the three characters on the corners of a triangle, like this:
 Place a pair of opposite features, for example: smart and stupid, on one side of the triangle. Ignore those while you place another pair of opposite features on a different side of the triangle. And then ignore those features, while you place still another pair of features on the remaining side. Now your triangle will look something like this:
 Continue to add features as so you see fit, and you are sure to have a triangle full of tension. When you´re done you can go on creating their personalities as you did before. If you´re still having problems polarising your characters, you may consider starting with these three fundamental types of characters:
If that´s not helping you, you may consider any one of these character charts as your starting point: A
B
C
And so on, until you have matched everyone with everyone else. If you start out like I have, with six character, this list will provide you with five features for every character, that will form a nice foundation for the next step in the process. But if you create more than four characters, consider this: It becomes increasingly difficult not to double a character, i.e. to make two characters so close, that they might as well be one. One way of solving that problem is to compare the two - making one character the positive and the other the superlative, as in "Frasier", where Frasier is the positive of "snob" and Niles is the superlative of "snob". This technique demands a lot from the writer, as you´ll have to make sure that the positive is not too bland. But when it works the result can be very interesting, as in GRUMPY OLD MEN, where you have two old men and then you have one even older man. Another technique to derive 9 or 16 (or 25, or 36...) characters simultaneously is to use opposite features, like this:
Thinker/Emoter Creative/Down-to-earth Reliable/Unreliable (And so on)
Start by giving them some more feature, what´s called characteristics. As if by a huge coincidence, I´ve written a column about it. Read it here.
By Lennart Guldbrandsson |
Chapters The story of us two The complimentary effect The trap Personas |
