Writing Advice: Characters

While plot is an important piece of a story, many would argue that the characters are even more so. The biggest complaint about both my first novel and my piece for the fiction writing class was that my characters are weak, so how can I strengthen them up?

A couple things have been bouncing around in my head, but we'll get to that later. First let's see what some more successful people than me have to say about it.

Chuck Wendig
So I've talked about Chuck before. He's not a famous novelist, but he's published short stories and does a lot of work with White-Wolf (the people who make Mage, the game I'm so enamored with).

His advice on character building starts with a concept sentence. A sentence or 3 that boils down the characters to their essential purpose. His second big piece is a story arc for that character. How does she evolve or change over the course of the story? Then you list a bunch of surface details, what's the person's life like. Then you go deeper, and talk about why they are the way they are.

Jim Butcher
Jim Butcher takes a much more simplistic view for building characters, though he argues for interesting characters just as hard as Chuck. He argues for the inclusion of 4 simple pieces.

•  Exaggeration - The character has to have something that makes them more interesting than the average person. Shakespeare was also a huge fan of this one, from what I remember of HS English.
• Exotic Position - In addition to being out of the ordinary, your character should be in an exotic position. One of the examples included a young woman in a high orbit shuttle, or Mr Incredible working in the insurance company.
• Introduction - The character should be introduced in a manner which completely typifies who he is. This establishes the charcters personality right off the bat.
• Verisimilitude - They should act believably. This one isn't really a surprise, but he goes into more details about how this can be achieved.
•  Emotion - Reaction - Decision. - The character should excibit all three of these throughout the story
• Tags  & Traits - Tags are words that are only used to describe that character, and traits are characteristics, could be props or features, manarisms, anything. 
• Empathy - No real tips on how to get this one, but the hope is that if you hit the other 4, you have a shot at this one.

He argues that most of this work happens in Sequels (which are not just 2nd, 3rd, etc. books, but also the reaction to a scene (where conflict happens)).

Kelley Armstrong

I mentioned that I found her posts online, but this is the first one I've had a chance to write about. In her post Outlining 102b, she gives her own approach to making characters.

1. The first step is a variation on a Psychological model I'll talk about in a bit. A character needs 4 things:
1. Goal - What are they trying to accomplish?
2. Motivation - Why do they want it?
3. Conflict - What's stopping them?
4. Stakes - What happens if they Fail.
2. GMCS should also have internal/external manifestations. 
3. Rather than make exhaustive lists, she likes to just include a paragraph about what the person's like
4. Last step, take the plot and tell it from the POV of each of your major characters. Not the whole novel, just a quick synopsis. 

Other Models

There are lots of place to take other ideas. One of the ones I've been looking at recently, given my hobbies, is Tabletop Role-Playing games. While traditional games involve very external stats (strength, intelligence, etc.) some of the newer story-intesnive games have been trying to add mechanicial benefits for looking deeper into your character. 

(new) World of Darkness rpgs include Virtue and Vice as part of the character creation. The virtue is one of the 7 heavenly virtues that your character aspires to, and Vice is one of the 7 deadly sins that holds your character back. Doesn't mean you can't use all of them, just which typifies your reactions. In addition, merits and flaws let you state mechanicially how your character is different from the norm, very similar to tags & traits from Jim Butcher's work.

Burning Wheel is another game I've been investigating recently. This one attributes 3 beliefs and 3 instincts to your character. Beliefs can range from concrete goals to ideals. I'm still trying to wrap my head around the mechanics, but they're there.

The Savage Worlds system, in particular the Deadlands setting, ask you to list your characters worst fear.

There are many others that I just haven't played, so I can't comment much. 

Another option is to look at psychological literature. One of the models that shows up in psychology, computer science (especially embodied agents research), is a simple 3-part model: Beliefs, Desires and Intentions. This is very similar to the Goal / Motivation / Conflict model. Beliefs and Desires affect the goals, and Intentions describe the rankings of beliefs and desires, to handle the case when two of them are in conflict. 

One of my friends,Kim, has mentioned that she likes to talk about her characters fears, and what happens when they are pushed to the extreme. This hits bits and pieces of what has been listed before, but in different ways. 

My fiction writing class talked about using two types of descriptions: Physical and Personal. Physical descriptions are external, and Personal describes different pieces of their personality, as expected. I'm looking back over my decisions there and realized that I didn't actually use any of them. Not a single thing came into my story.

Conclusions

So those are the pieces of advice that I've collected over the past couple months. The funny thing is none of these are mutually exclusive. Taking bits and pieces of each one might make for a very complete character portrait.

Now that I've talked a little bit about different types of advice, I think it's time to put my nose to the grindstone and actually try some of these planning activities. Look for it in the next week or so.